-T - ^
Updated with the latest
information to get on the Internet
Complete guide to what’s hot, what’s not, where it is, and
I how to get it
: Special otters from more than 50 regional, national, and international
i Internet access providers— including free trial time and/or discounts
New! Everything you need to know about the World Wide Weh! Browse the
Web. Even create your own Web pages including text, graphics, and links!
Features access to a special FTP site containing over
50 MB of valuable fools and information
Take full advantage of multimedia on the Web by setting up your Web
browser with “helper applications”
I Step-by-step instructions for connecting your system and getting
more out of the Internet
W".
for Macintosh*
Third Edition
Adam C. Engst
Publisher of TidBITS
‘I Software Included!
MacTCP®— Your key to the Internet!
The essential utility from Apple.
MacPPP & InterSLIP — Connect to the^ Internet
easily via modem.
Anarchie — Find and download files in no time!
Eudora— Read, write, and send Internet email!
I MacWeb— Browse the incredible World Wide Web!
Internet Config — Configure your Internet software
easily and quickly.
Stuffit Expander™ — Decompress files from the Net. ,
Double-click access to many other essential Internet
programs!
SiiTjpla “one button” installation
QuickStart!
Figure out how to
choose an Internet
access provider.
Appendix A
Pick an Internet
access provider.
Chapter 16
Install and configure
the software using
the ISKM disk.
Chapter 29
Follow step-by-step
instructions to connect,
send email, browse the
Web, and more!
If you're the sort who absolutely hates reading instructions on how to do
anything and would prefer to experiment on your own, this QuickStart is for
you. You'll be better off following the book as it is organized, but I recognize that
some of you are impatient. After you've played on the net and you want to
figure out what you are really doing, come back and read the rest of the book.
Just a warning though: If you rely only on this QuickStart, you may have more
trouble in the long (and short) run, so don't say I didn't warn you!
Internet
Starter
Kit
for
Macintosh
3rd Edition
Internet
Starter
Kit for
Macintosh
3rd Edition
Hayden
Books
Adam C. Engst
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, 3rd Edition
©1995 Hayden Books, a division of Macmillan Computer Publishing
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval
system, without prior written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Making copies of any part of this
book for any purpose other than your own personal use is a violation of United States
copyright laws. For information, address Hayden Books, 201 W. 103rd Street,
Indianapolis, Indiana 46290.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 95-60415
ISBN: 1-56830-197-9
This book is sold as is, without warranty of any kind, either express or implied. While
every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author
assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for
damages resulting from the use of the information or instructions contained herein. It is
further stated that the publisher and author are not responsible for any damage or loss to
your data or your equipment that results directly or indirectly from your use of this book.
97 96 95 4 3 2 1
Interpretation of the printing code: the rightmost double-digit number is the year of the
book's printing; the rightmost single-digit number is the number of the book's printing.
For example, a printing code of 95-1 shows that the first printing of the book occurred in
1995.
Trademark Acknowledgtnents: All products mentioned in this book are either trademarks
of the companies referenced in this book, registered trademarks of the companies
referenced in this book, or neither. We strongly advise that you investigate a particular
product's name thoroughly before you use the name as your own.
Apple, Mac, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
The Hayden Books Team
Publisher
David Rogelberg
Aquisitions Manager
Karen Whitehouse
Interior Designers
Fred Bower
Barbara Kordesh
Kevin Spear
Illustrator
Manager of Product Kevin Spear
Development ^ ^ .
^ Cover Designer
Patrick Gibbons ^ ^
Jay Corpus
Development Editor
Brad Miser
Copy/Production Editors
Meshell Dinn
Steve Mulder
Marketing Manager
Andy Roth
Publishing Coordinator
Rosemary Lewis
Production
Gary Adair, Angela Calvert,
Dan Caparo, Laurie Casey,
Kim Cofer, David Garratt,
Aleata Howard, Shawn MacDonald,
Joe Millay, Erika Millen, Beth Rago,
Gina Rexrode, Erich J. Richter,
Christine Tyner, Karen Walsh,
Robert Wolf
Indexer
Chris Cleveland
Composed in Pnlatino and Futura
License Information
HAYDEN'S LICENSOR(S) MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IM-
PLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE,
REGARDING THE SOFTWARE. HAYDEN'S LICENSOR(S) DOES NOT WAR-
RANT, GUARANTEE, OR MAKE ANY REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING
THE USE OR THE RESULTS OF THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE IN TERMS OF
ITS CORRECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, CURRENTNESS OR OTHER-
WISE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE RESULTS AND PERFORMANCE OF
THE SOFTWARE IS ASSUMED BY YOU. THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED
WARRANTIES IS NOT PERMITTED BY SOME JURISDICTIONS. THE ABOVE
EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.
IN NO EVENT WILL HAYDEN'S LICENSOR(S), AND THEIR DIRECTORS,
OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES OR AGENTS (COLLECTIVELY HAYDEN'S LICEN-
SOR) BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR
INDIRECT DAMAGES (INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS
PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION,
AND THE LIKE) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE
SOFTWARE EVEN IF HAYDEN'S LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. BECAUSE SOME JURISDICTIONS DO
NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CON-
SEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, THE ABOVE LIMITATIONS
MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. Hayden's Licensor's liability to you for actual
damages from any cause whatsoever, and regardless of the form of the action
(whether in contract, tort (including negligence), product liability, or otherwise),
will be limited to $50.
To Our Readers
Dear Friend,
Thank you on behalf of everyone at Hayden Books for choosing Internet Starter
Kit for Macintosh to enable you to explore the Internet. The Internet is the fastest
growing, and most exciting, aspect of our modern society. Without the right
guide, participating on the Iiiternet can be difficult. We have carefully crafted
this book and disk to enable you to both learn about the Internet and actually
get on it. We wish you the best in your explorations and hopefully, we'll meet
you there soon!
What you think of this book is important to our ability to better serve you in the
future. If you have any comments, no matter how great or small, we'd appreci-
ate you taking the time to send us email or a note by snail mail. Of course, we'd
love to hear your book ideas.
Sincerely yours.
Publisher, Hayden Books and Adobe Press
You can reach Hayden Books at the following:
Hayden Books
201 West 103rd Street
Indianapolis, IN 46290
(800) 428-5331 voice
(800) 448-3804 fax
Email addresses:
America Online:
AppleLink:
CompuServe:
Internet:
Hayden Bks
hay den. books
76350,3014
bradm@hayden.com
Dedication
To my lovely and talented wife, Tonya, without whose patience and writing
skills I would certainly have gone stark raving mad long ago.
About the Author
Adam C. Engst
Adam C. Engst is the editor and publisher of TidBlTS, a free electronic newslet-
ter distributed weekly on the worldwide computer networks to over 150,000
readers. After graduating from Cornell University with a double-major in
Hypertextual Fiction and Classics, he worked as an independent consultant in
Ithaca, New York, where he started TidBlTS in April of 1990. He now lives in
Western Washington with his wife, Tonya, and cats, Tasha and Cubbins, but
seems to spend most of his time corresponding via electronic mail with friends
and associates around the globe.
After writing the first edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (released in
September of 1993), he was somehow rooked into coauthoring Internet Explorer
Kit for Macintosh with Bill Dickson, and the first edition of Internet Starter Kit for
Windows with Cory Low and Mike Simon. These titles were published in April
of 1994, and the second edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh came out in
August of 1994. In March of 1995, the second edition of Internet Starter Kit for
Windows was published, again in collaboration with Cory and Mike.
Like anyone who attempts to condense the immensity of the Internet into a
single book, he is certifiably crazy. His favorite quote (which reportedly comes
from Alan Kay, an Apple Fellow and Xerox PARC alumnus) is: "The best way to
predict the future is to invent it."
Acknowledgments
Thanks
Many people have helped me throughout the writing of this edition, and with
previous editions of the book. I especially want to thank my wife Tonya, who
not only helped out but put up with me during the final few weeks of each
edition, which is not a task for the faint of heart. I must also thank my editor,
Brad Miser of Hayden Books, who went out of his way to help make the book a
success.
Thanks as well to my mother, who now runs her own Web server on a Power
Mac 8100/80, and my father, who has become quite the late night Internet
denizen. Td also like to thank all the readers of TidBITS because they have kept
me going these last five years. Finally, thanks to the many readers and support-
ers of the previous editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. Word of mouth
goes a long way, and the book wouldn't have lasted nearly this long without
such support from so many individuals in the Internet community.
If I've forgotten anyone, my sincere apologies. Please accept my absent-minded
thanks.
Surrogate Editors
Thanks are due to the many people who helped edit portions of this and previ-
ous editions of the book and those who either provided me with information or
helped test the ISKM Installer. I wish only that I had room to give everyone the
full credit they deserve.
Alan Oppenheimer, Alwin Li, Amanda Walker, Amir Rosenblatt, Andrew
Green, Barbara Maxwell, Bill Cockayne, Bill Dickson, Bill Gram-Reefer, Bill Lipa,
Brian Hall, Brian Lichorowic, Cary Lu, Chad Magendanz, Chuck Shotton, Chuq
Von Rospach, Cory Low, Dave Winer, David Thompson, Draper Kauffnian,
Drummond Reed, Erik Speckman, Franklin Davis, Geoff Duncan, Glenn
Fleishman, Gordon Watts, Guy Kawasaki, Guy Stevens, Harry Morris, Herb
Effron, Ian Brown, Igor Livshits, James Skee, Jeff Needleman, Jeff Steele, Jim
Mattliews, Jim O'Dell, John Baxter, John Hardin, John Mah, John Norstad, John
Werner, Jonathan Lundell, Jud Spencer, Katie Hudson, Kee Nethery, Ken
Landau, Ken Stuart, Larry Blunk, Laurent Humbert, Len MacDonell, Leonard
Rosenthol, Mark H. Anbinder, Mark McCahill and the Gopher Team, Mark
Verber, Mark Williamson, Meshell Dinn, Michael Tardiff, Michael Wellman,
Mikael Hansen, Mike Goode, Mike Simon, Paul Celestin, Pete Resnick, Peter
Broadribb, Peter Fraterdeus, Peter Lewis, Quinn, Richard Ford, Rick Watson,
Roger Brown, Roger Jacobs, Ross Scott Rubin, Roy Wood, Roz Ault, Rusty
Tucker, Sandro Menzel, Scott Gruby, Sky Dayton, Steve Dagley, Steve Dorner,
Steve Michel, Steve Mulder, Steve Worona, Werner Uhrig, and Will Mayall.
Software Thanks To. . .
Although 1 don't have room to individually acknowledge the programmers of
all the software I mention in the book, I do want to thank those who graciously
allowed me to include their programs on the disk, including the following:
Leonard Rosenthol, and all the folks at Aladdin Systems, for Stufflt
InstallerMaker and Stufflt Expander
Garry Hornbuckle and the MacTCP team at Apple Computer, for MacTCP
Larry Blunk and Merit Network, for MacPPP
Amanda Walker and InterCon Systems, for InterSLIP
Peter Lewis, for Anarchie
Peter Lewis, again, and Quinn "The Eskimo!", for Internet Config
Steve Dorner and Qualcomm, for Eudora
John Hardin of MCC's EINet group, for MacWeb
Other Invaluable Aid Provided By . . .
Liam Breck, for helping set up the Info-Mac Archive mirror software at
ftp.tidblts.com
Paul Celestin, for creating and maintaining the Providers of Commercial Internet
Access list
Ed Morin, Ralph Sims, Michael Tardiff, and Scott Anderson of Northwest Nexus
for technical assistance above and beyond the call of duty and for providing my
Internet connections
Charles Cooper of OneWorld, for hosting the Web pages over the last year
Geoff Duncan, once again, for creating the biternet Starter Kit for Macintosh Web
page
And finally, Tonya Engst, for writing chapter 26, "Create Your Web Page," editing
chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet," and for just generally being wonderful
Contents at a Glance
Part I: Introduction and History 1
1 Welcome 3
2 Why Is the Internet Neat? 9
3 What Is the Internet? 15
4 The Internet Beanstalk 37
5 Exploring the Internet 51
Part II: Internet Foundations 101
6 Addressing & URLs 103
7 Email Basics 117
8 Usenet News Basics 145
9 TCP/IP Internet Services 161
10 File Formats 185
Part III: Partial Internet Access 201
11 Choosing a Connection 203
12 Commercial Services 217
13 Bulletin Board Systems 261
14 Shell Account Enhancements 271
15 UUCP Access 289
Part IV: Full Internet Access 291
16 Internet Starter Kit Disk 297
17 MacTCP 311
18 PPP 329
19 SLIP 349
20 Troubleshooting Your Connection 365
21 Email 385
22 Usenet News 407
23 FTP 435
24 Gopher 453
25 World Wide Web 461
26 Creating Your Web Page 485
27 Utilities & Miscellany 521
28 Integrated Programs 551
29 Step-by-Step Internet 573
Part V: Appendices 613
A Internet Starter Kit Providers 615
B Providers of Commercial Internet Access 635
C HTML Tags 667
D Glossary 671
Index 691
Table of Contents
Part I Introduction and History 1
1 Welcome 3
Who Are You? 3
What Do You Need? 4
Who Am I? 5
Changes 6
2 Why Is the Internet Neat? 9
Electronic Mail 10
Discussion Groups 10
Software 11
Information at Your Electronic Fingertips 11
The Lemming Factor 12
The Internet is What You Make of It 13
Champing at the Bit 14
3 What Is the Internet? 15
Size 15
People 16
Machines 16
Information 17
Geographic Size 17
People — Doing What They Do Best 18
Hardware 20
Computers 20
Networks 21
Modems and Phone Lines 22
Softw^are 25
Information 27
The Internet Post Office 28
Electronic Mail 30
Usenet News 31
Telnet 32
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) 33
WAIS 34
Gopher 34
World Wide Web 35
Summing Up 36
XIV
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
4 The Internet Beanstalk 37
Cold War Network 37
Gateways 39
Usenet 40
BITNET 41
NSFNET 41
NREN 42
Who Pays? 43
Politics 45
The Future 46
Past and Future — Next, the Present 49
5 Exploring the Internet 51
People 52
Net Alter Egos 56
Celebrities 60
Finding Your Niche 63
Lurking 65
Introducing Yourself 66
One of the Gang 66
Signal-to-Noise 68
Interactive Internet 68
IRC — #superguy 69
MUCKing with the Furries 73
Browsing the Second-Hand Bookstore
of the Internet 76
Aimless Wandering 77
I Wonder If 84
Looking for Files in All the Wrong Places 88
Owning an Internet Press 95
Newsletters 95
Magazines and Books 97
Moving On 100
Part II Internet Foundations 101
6 Addressing & URLs 103
Addressing 103
Top-level Domains 104
Mid-level Domains 106
Machine Name 107
Userid 108
Punctuation 109
Alternative Addresses 110
Contents XV
URLs Ill
What are URLs? Ill
URL Construction 112
Using URLs 114
Weird Characters 115
A Self-Addressed Internet 116
7 Email Basics 117
Email Construction 117
Signature 117
Body 118
Header 123
Bounces 126
Using Email Programs 127
Reading Email 127
Navigating and Managing Email 128
Replying to Email 129
New Email 130
Finding People 131
Friends 132
Acquaintances 133
Mailing Lists 133
Moderated vs. Unmoderated 135
Individual Messages vs. Digests 136
Mailing List Managers 137
Neither Rain, Nor Snow 143
8 Usenet News Basics 145
Usenet Plumbing 146
Newsgroup Innards 147
Message Construction 149
The Newsgroup Stork 151
Using Usenet 153
Subscribing to Groups 153
Reading Articles 153
Navigation 154
rotl3 155
Extracting Binary Files 156
Replying to Articles 156
Follow-ups 157
Posting an Article 158
ClariNet 159
Enough Usenet 160
XVI
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
9 TCP/IP Internet Services 161
FTP 161
FTP Manners 162
FTP Clients 163
FTP by Email 164
Archie 169
Telnet Usage 171
IRC 172
MUDs 172
WAIS 174
Gopher 178
Veronica 180
Jughead 180
World Wide Web 181
Wrapping Up 184
10 File Formats 185
ASCII Encoding 186
BinHex 187
uucode 188
btoa 189
Compression Formats 190
Stufflt 3.0 191
Compact Pro 192
Self-Extracting Archives 192
Unix Compression 192
More Compression Formats 193
DOS Compression 194
Other File Types 194
Text Files 194
Graphics Files 198
Sound and Video Files 199
Format's Last Theorem 200
Part III Partial Internet Access 201
11 Choosing a Connection 203
Eliminating Options 203
Commercial Services 204
Bulletin Board Systems 205
Unix Shell Accounts 205
UUCP 206
MacTCP-based Connections 207
Contents XVII
Cost 208
Flat-Rate Accounts 208
Restricted Flat-Rate Accounts 208
Pseudo Flat-Rate Accounts 209
Per-Hour Accounts 209
Other Fees 209
Phone Charges 210
Service 212
Reliability, Accessibility, and Support 213
Special Services 214
Taking the Plunge 216
12 Commercial Services 217
America Online 219
Internet Connections 220
Internet Services 221
Charges & Connecting 232
CompuServe 233
CompuServe via PPP 233
Special Software 234
Internet Connections 235
Internet Services 236
Charges & Connecting 243
eWorld 244
Internet Connections 245
Internet Services 245
Charges & Connecting 247
Other Commercial Services 248
Email Utilities 252
Emailer 252
Wrapping Up 259
13 Bulletin Board Systems 261
FirstClass 262
NovaLink Professional 265
TeleFinder 266
Wrapping Up BBSs 270
14 Shell Account Enhancements 271
The Internet Adapter 272
TIA Basics 273
TIA Details 274
Installing TIA 274
xvm
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Eudora 276
Installation and Setup 277
A Major Kludge 281
Other Shell Enhancements 282
Terminal Emulators 284
Shell-Shocked 287
15 UUCP Access 289
Where'd It Go? 290
A Quick Reminder about UUCP 290
Part IV Full Internet Access 291
16 Internet Starter Kit Disk 297
There's More 298
ftp.tidbits.com 298
ISKM Home Page 299
ISKM Installer 300
How to Install 300
Configuring MacTCP 302
Configuring MacPPP 303
Configuring Eudora and Email 305
Configuring Usenet News 306
Configuring Anarchie and FTP 306
Configuring Other MacTCP-based Applications 306
Installation Details 306
Installation Option Details 306
Moving on to MacTCP 309
17 MacTCP 311
MacTCP 311
If You Use an Internet Starter Kit Provider 313
MacTCP Questions 313
Installation and Setup 315
MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep 321
The Hosts File 322
MacTCP Utilities 323
Open Transport 326
Mission Accomplished 328
18 PPP 329
Getting an Account 331
MacPPP 332
Installation and Setup 333
Basic Usage 341
Contents XIX
Overall Evaluation 342
Administrative Details 342
MacPPP Add-ons 343
Other PPP Implementations 345
MacTCP via ARA 346
SLIPing On 348
19 SLIP 349
Getting an Account 351
InterSLlP 352
Installation and Setup 352
Basic Usage 358
SLIPing 359
Using System 6 360
Overall Evaluation 361
Administrative Details 361
InterSLlP Add-Ons 362
Other SLIP Software 363
But What If 364
20 Troubleshooting Your Connection 365
Reporting Problems 366
MacTCP Q & A 368
Domain Name Server Errors 371
MacPPPQ&A 375
InterSLlP Q& A 379
Book 'Em, Danno 383
21 Email 385
Eudora 385
Installation and Setup 387
Basic Usage 390
Special Features 395
Evaluation & Details 396
Other Email Clients 396
Email Utility Programs 400
Emptying the Mailbox 406
22 Usenet News 407
NewsWatcher 407
Installation and Setup 408
Basic Usage 411
Special Features 413
Evaluation and Details 414
XX
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Nuntius 415
Installation and Setup 415
Basic Usage 417
Special Features 420
Evaluation and Details 421
NewsHopper 421
Installation and Setup 421
Basic Usage 425
Special Features 428
Evaluation and Details 430
Other News Programs 430
All the News That's Fit to Post 433
23 FTP 435
Anarchie 436
Installation and Setup 436
Basic Usage 437
Special Features 440
Evaluation and Details 443
Fetch 444
Installation and Setup 444
Basic Usage 445
Special Features 448
Evaluation and Details 449
Other FTP Programs 450
Finalizing FTP 452
24 Gopher 453
TurboGopher 453
Basic Usage 453
Special Features 457
Evaluation & Details 457
Other Gopher Clients 458
The Closing Gopher Holes 459
25 World Wide Web 461
MacWeb 462
Installation and Setup 462
Basic Usage 463
Special Features 466
Evaluation & Details 467
Netscape Navigator 467
Installation & Setup 468
Basic Usage 470
Contents XXI
Special Features 473
Evaluation & Details 475
Other Web-related Programs 475
MacWWW 477
Helper Applications 479
WWWrapping Up 483
26 Creating Your Web Page 485
Web Authoring Preview 486
Introduction to HTML 487
Tags for Text 489
New Paragraphs and Lines 489
Topic Headings 489
Lists and Glossaries 490
Addresses — Snail Mail and Email 491
Typographical Styles 492
Entities — Coding for Special Characters 494
Quotations 495
Preformatted Text, Specially Formatted Text, and
HTML 3.0 495
Tags for Links 496
Linking to Other Pages 496
Links to Other Internet Resources 498
Links within a Web Page 499
Web Graphics 500
GIF versus JPEG 500
Converting Images into GIF or JPEG Format 501
Tags for an Inline Graphic 504
Horizontal Lines 505
Tags for an External Graphic 507
Sound and Video Links 508
Copying HTML 509
Web Page Content 509
Testing Tags 510
Troubleshooting Tips 511
External Approval 511
Publicizing Your Page 512
HTML Converters 512
RTF Converters 512
XTND Converters 513
Programs with HTML Add-ons 513
Alpha 514
BBEdit and BBEdit Lite 514
XXII
Interfief Starter Kit for Macintosh
FrameMaker 514
Microsoft Word 514
Nisus Writer 515
PageMaker 515
QuarkXPress 516
Story space 516
HTML Authoring Programs 516
Web Resources 520
HTML for Fun and Profit 520
27 Utilities & Miscellany 521
Internet Config 521
Installation & Setup 523
Basic Usage 523
Evaluation & Details 528
Telnet 529
NCSA Telnet 529
WAIS 533
Games 534
Information Finders 537
Finger 538
Real-Time Communication 542
Talk 543
Tools 547
Concluding the Cacophony 549
28 Integrated Programs 551
TCP /Connect II 552
Email 552
Usenet News 555
FTP 556
Telnet 558
Gopher 558
World Wide Web 559
Other Utilities 561
Evaluation & Details 562
VersaTerm-Link 563
Email 564
Usenet News 565
FTP 566
Telnet 568
Other Utilities 568
Evaluation & Details 570
Contents XXIII
Other Integrated Programs? 570
Integrating and Differentiating 571
Step-by-Step Internet 573
MacTCP 2.0.6 574
Install MacTCP 574
Configure MacTCP 575
MacPPP 2.0.1 577
Install MacPPP 577
Configure MacPPP 578
Establish an Internet Connection 581
Close the Internet Connection 582
InterSLIP 1.0.1 583
Install InterSLIP 583
Configure InterSLIP 584
Establish an Internet Connection 587
Close the Internet Connection 588
Internet Config 588
Configure Internet Config 589
Eudora 1.5.1 591
Launch and Configure Eudora 592
Compose and Send an Email Message to President
Clinton 594
Subscribe to the TidBITS Mailing List 596
Read, Reply to, and Delete an Email Message 597
NewsWatcher 2.0b24 598
Launch and Configure NewsWatcher 599
Create a Personalized Subscription List and
Subscribe to Several Newsgroups 601
Read Articles in a Subscribed Newsgroup 602
Post an Article 603
Anarchie 1.5 604
Launch and Configure Anarchie 605
Connect to a Site and Retrieve a File 605
Use a Bookmark to Retrieve a File 606
MacWeb 1.00A3.2 607
Launch and Configure MacWeb 607
Browse the Web 609
Visit a Specific Web Site 610
Use the Hotlist 611
This Is Only the Beginning 612
XXrV Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Part V Appendices 613
A Internet Starter Kit Providers 615
B Providers of Commercial Internet Access 635
Domestic 637
Free Service Providers 637
Nationwide Service Providers 637
Toll-Free Service Providers 638
Regional Service Providers 638
Foreign 661
C HTML Tags 667
D Glossary 671
Index 691
Introdxiction XXV
Introduction
Before anything else, please believe me when I say that this book is not a manual
to be ignored after you've ripped the disk from the back cover and stuffed it in
your Macintosh. Using the Internet is not like using a word processor. There are
some quirks and confusions that I explain, but they may frustrate you to no end
if you don't bother to read the sections about using the different programs. Also,
if you don't bother to read the instructions provided for, say, connecting to an
Internet provider, and then you call the provider for help, you cannot expect
them to be happy about explaining over the phone what I've already explained
in the book.
That said, I want to tell you a little about how I designed Internet Starter Kit for
Macintosh, because I think it will help you make the most of the book in the
limited time that we all have. As with any broad subject, some parts of the
Internet won't interest you in the slightest, and that's fine. However, I feel that
it's important to cover many of these topics even if they won't interest all of my
readers. So, let's look quickly at each of the five parts that make up this book,
and I'll tell you what to expect.
Part I: Introduction and
History
This part stays fairly general, introducing you to the book and to the Internet,
and trying to offer a way of looking at the world through Internet-colored
glasses. Chapter 1, "Welcome," serves as the introduction. Chapter 2 seeks to
answer the question, "Why is the Internet Neat?" The third chapter, "What is the
Internet?," tackles a more difficult issue and attempts to explain just what the
Internet is. Next, Chapter 4, "The Internet Beanstalk," traces a line down the
history of the Internet, branching off to look briefly at other topics of potential
interest. If you're new to the Internet, you should definitely read the first three
chapters, and if you're at all interested in a historical perspective, read the
fourth.
The fifth chapter, "Exploring the Internet," is excerpted from Internet Explorer Kit
for Macintosh. I wanted to provide a sense of what life is like on the Internet, so I
talked my co-author on that book. Bill Dickson, into putting together this
chapter with me. If you like Chapter 5, you may want to pick up a copy of
Internet Explorer Kit in a bookstore — it contains lots of great stuff we couldn't fit
into the excerpt.
XXVI Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Part II: Internet Foundations
Part II is required reading for novices because it covers network foundations in
terms of basic usage and social customs. It's important because it provides much
of the Internet's community knowledge. If you want to know how email is
constructed, for example, or when you should avoid using FTP, you should read
this part. Community knowledge can be difficult to pick up without spending a
lot of time on the Internet, so these chapters can save you a lot of time and
trouble.
Chapter 6, "Addressing & URLs" covers the basics of addressing and focuses
tightly on Uniform Resources Locators, or URLs, which are used to provide a
coherent method of identifying Internet resources such as Web pages and files
available via FTP. Chapter 7, "Email Basics," looks at email usage and mailing
lists, and Chapter 8, "Usenet News Basics," is devoted exclusively to Usenet
news. Chapter 9 describes "TCP/IP Internet Services," those being services that
require a full Internet connection, such as Telnet, FTP, WAIS, Gopher, and the
World Wide Web. Finally, Chapter 10, "File Formats," discusses the many file
formats you find on the Internet.
Part III: Partial Internet Access
The five chapters in Part III discuss choosing an Internet connection along with
examining four different methods of accessing the Internet. Chapter 11, "Choos-
ing a Connection," addresses how you go about choosing a provider when faced
with the myriad choices awaiting you. Chapter 12, "Commercial Services," starts
off the rest of the section by looking at what can be the easiest (although limited)
method of Internet access — using a commercial online service such as
CompuServe or America Online. Chapter 13, "Bulletin Board Systems," takes a
quick look at some popular types of bulletin board software that can both
provide access to the Internet and can be accessible through the Internet. Chap-
ter 14, "Shell Account Enhancements," tells you about different programs that
you can use to obtain a graphical interface on the ugly Unix command-line
interface of the shell account. Chapter 15, "UUCP Access," explores an older, but
still useful, method of access that provides only electronic mail and news — the
UUCP connection.
I include Part III in Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh because I feel that you
should have as much information about the different ways of connecting to the
Internet as possible. If you don't plan on using any of these methods of connect-
ing to the Internet, feel free to ignore chapters 13 through 15 entirely. I won't be
offended, but please do read Chapter 11, "Choosing a Connection," because it
will help you learn what questions to ask of a potential Internet provider, and
that's important.
Introduction XXVII
Part IV: Full Internet Access
Chapters 16 through 29 of Part IV look in depth at the most powerful and
flexible method of connection to the Internet — the MacTCP connection. Al-
though the other methods of connection are important and useful (and often
more cost-effective), nothing compares with the range and quality of software
available for Macs connected to the Internet and running MacTCP. I felt so
strongly about helping readers get a full MacTCP connection to the Internet that
Hayden Books licensed MacTCP from Apple and included it on the disk that
comes with this book. Other programs that you need to immediately start using
a MacTCP connection via your modem are also included. Speaking of the disk,
chapter 16 tells what's on it and how the installer works.
Chapters 17, "MacTCP," 18, "PPP," 19, "SLIP," and 20, "Troubleshooting Your
Connection," take you through the sometimes pesky details of configuring your
Macintosh to connect to the Internet. This may seem like more information than
is necessary, and it is, assuming everything works perfectly. But, as we all know,
there's no way to guarantee perfection in this world, so all the information in
these chapters, especially Chapter 20, "Troubleshooting Your Connection," tips
the scales in your favor against the entropy of the universe. At least, that's how I
like to look at it.
Although chapters 17 through 20 will get you on the Internet with a MacTCP
connection, nothing happens until you run a MacTCP-based program. That's
what I cover in chapters 21 through 28, starting with "Email" and "Usenet
News," and continuing on to "FTP," "Gopher," and "World Wide Web."
Bringing up the end are chapters on "Utilities & Miscellany" and "Integrated
Programs."
Chapter 26, "Creating Your Web Page," rather than talking about MacTCP-
based software specifically, instead takes you through the process of creating
your own home page for the World Wide Web. In the process I look at the
various HTML editors and other related programs.
Finally, Chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet," takes a bare bones approach to
teaching you how to use the most popular MacTCP-based programs, some of
which are included on the disk. If you're uncertain how to perform basic tasks
with these programs, this chapter is for you.
Again, there's probably quite a bit more information here than you absolutely
have to know. That's why I've opted for describing in detail only the most
important programs, and providing capsule reviews of the remaining applica-
tions. After you finish reading these chapters, you should have a good idea of
what's out there; even if you don't use these programs right away, you can
always come back to this section to read up on a program that you've just
downloaded.
XXVIII Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Part V: Appendices
The fifth part of this book is a collection of appendices for browsing and skim-
ming.
Appendix A, "Internet Starter Kit Providers/' lists providers that have agreed to
offer a special deal to Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh readers. I've also in-
cluded custom configurations for these providers on the ISKM disk so that you
can use the ISKM Installer to configure your Macintosh to work with any of
them. This is by far the easiest method of configuring MacTCP and MacPPP for
a specific provider!
Appendix B, "Providers of Commercial Internet Access," comes from the
Celestin Company; it is a large list of Internet providers around the world —
complete with telephone and email contact information. If none of the providers
listed in Appendix A, "Internet Starter Kit Providers," are appropriate for you,
browse through this list (it's sorted by area code and country) to find another
provider that may better meet your needs.
Appendix C lists the HTML tags covered in chapter 26, "Creating Your Web
Page."
Appendix D, "Glossary," briefly explains some of the common terms and
acronyms that you're guaranteed to run into on the Internet.
Last, but not least, comes the ever-popular index and an online information
sheet that you ’might find useful for recording various details about your
Internet connection.
Welcome to Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, welcome to the Internet, and
please, make yourself at home.
Adam C. Engst
May, 1995
p
r t
a
Introduction and
History
In this part of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, I introduce myself and give you a
look at what the Internet is, why it's so neat, and where it came from. I also give you
a glimpse of what life on the net is like. These five chapters convey the proper
mindset for thinking about the Internet, a mindset without which you may find the
Internet an overwhelming place.
Chapter 1, "Welcome," starts out slowly to allow us to introduce ourselves to one
another. It also lays out the basic requirements for using the Internet. Chapter 2,
"Why is the Internet Neat?," talks about what makes the Internet a special place, and
chapter 3, "What is the Internet?," supports that by attempting to define the Internet.
Chapter 4, "The Internet Beanstalk," provides a brief look at the past and future of
the Internet, although if you don't like reading about history, feel free to skip it. If
you find yourself condemned to repeat history at some later time, though, don't
blame me, since chapter 4 provides the background that you need to understand
why the Internet is the way it is and how it works politically. Finally, chapter 5,
"Exploring the Internet," gives you a feel for what life on the net is really like. It's an
excerpt from my book Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh (Hayden Books, 1994), co-
authored with Bill Dickson.
Welcome
Welcome to the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, 3rd Edition. I have two goals
for this book, at least one of which hopefully applies to you as either its pro-
spective buyer or proud new owner. First, I want to tell you about the
Internet — what it is and why it's so wonderful (and I mean that in all senses of
the word, especially the bit about becoming filled with wonderment) — and
introduce you to a number of the services and resources that make it one of
humankind's greatest achievements. Second, I want to show you how to gain
access to the Internet and how to use many of the Macintosh tools available for
working with it. I've even included some of these tools on the disk that comes
with this book so that you can get started right away. For those tools that I
didn't have room for on the disk, I tell you where on the Internet to go to get
them. But before I start, let's skip the small talk and introduce ourselves.
Who Are You?
I haven't the foggiest idea who you are. That's not true, actually; I can make a
couple of guesses. You probably are a Macintosh user, because if you aren't,
only about half of this book will hold your interest. You probably are also
interested in the Internet; otherwise, only about two percent of the book is
worth your time. Given those minor prerequisites, this book should provide
hours of educational entertainment, just like Uncle Milton's Ant Farm. The
major difference is that the Internet Ant Farm is worlds bigger than Uncle
4 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Milton's, and if you go away on vacation, all the Internet ants won't keel over — although
you may be tempted to do so when you get back and see how much you have to catch up
on. The Internet never stops.
I've written this book for the individual, the person behind that most personal of personal
computers, the Macintosh. In the process, I undoubtedly will disappoint the die-hard
Unix system administrators and network gurus who talk about X.400 and TCP/IP in their
sleep (which doesn't come often because of the amount of Jolt cola they consume). I'm
aiming this book at students and staff at universities, which often have wonderful connec-
tions to the Internet, but seldom provide any guidance about what's out there. And Tm
aiming at user groups, who can teach their members about the Internet with the aid of a
good book and disk resource. I'm also aiming at ordinary people who have a Mac, a
modem, and the desire to start using the Internet. And, yes. I'm even aiming at those Unix
system administrators because what better way to get those annoying Macintosh users off
your back than by giving them this book?
I should note that this book will not particularly help you learn how to become a provider
of information, a publisher if you will, on the Internet. That's an entirely separate topic
that deserves its own book, which I may someday write. This particular book is for
Internet consumers, not publishers.
What Do You Need?
This book, of course — why do you think I wrote it? But beyond that...
First, you need a Macintosh. That's not absolutely true, because you can use any sort of
computer to access the Internet, but to get the most out of this book you should use a
Macintosh. (For those of you who use Windows, check out Internet Starter Kit for Win-
dows.) You don't need a fast Macintosh, although it would be nice. When I wrote the first
edition of this book, I used an elderly SE/30, and although I've since moved up to a
Centris 660AV, most things I do on the Internet haven't changed much with the faster
Mac.
Second, you need some type of physical connection to the Internet. This connection may
take the form of a local area network at work or, more likely, a modem. A 2,400 bps
modem works, though only barely, and the faster the better, with a 28,800 bps modem
being the best. If you start out with a 2,400 bps modem, be prepared to buy a new one
soon. That speed will become intolerable quickly, and why make something as fascinating
as the Internet intolerable?
Third, I recommend that you use System 7 or later, if only because I haven't used System
6 in over four years and have no idea whether the software included on the disk works
under System 6. That's not entirely true — some of the basic programs will work — but
many others, including the best ones, now require System 7. All of my instructions
assume that you are using System 7. If you need to upgrade, talk to your dealer.
Chapter 1 ♦ Welcome 5
Fourth, you need an account on a host machine somewhere. In Chapter 11, "Choosing a
Provider," I cover how to find an appropriate account for your needs.
Fifth, you need a certain level of computer experience. This stuff simply is not for the
Macintosh novice. If you don't know the difference between a menu and a window, or
haven't figured out how to tell applications and documents apart, I recommend that you
visit your local user group and ask a lot of questions. A number of excellent books also
are available. My favorite is The Little Mac Book, by Robin Williams. You can also read
your manuals, but frankly, as good as Apple's documentation is, Robin does a better job.
Finally, you may need to adjust your expectations. The Internet is not a commercial
service like America Online or CompuServ^e. Customer service representatives are not
available via a toll-free call 24 hours a day. The majority of people on the Internet have
taught themselves enough to get on or have been shown just enough by friends to con-
nect to the Internet. The Internet is vei*}' much a learning experience; even with as much
information and guidance as I provide in this book, there's simply no way to anticipate
every question that might come up through those first few days. The Internet is what you
make it — so don't be shy. No one greets you on your first dip in, but at the same time,
people on the Internet are some of the most helpful I've ever had the pleasure to know. If
you are struggling, just ask and someone almost always comes to your aid. I wish that
were true outside of the Internet as well.
"Who am I?" is a question that I often ask myself. In the interests of leaving my autobiog-
raphy for later, I must limit the answer to the parts that are relevant to this book. My
name, as you probably figured out from the cover, is Adam Engst. I started using comput-
ers in grade school and had my first experience with a mainframe and a network while
playing Adventure over a 300 baud acoustic modem (you know, where you dial the
number and stuff the receiver into the modem's rubber ears) on a computer that my uncle
used in New' York City. I used microcomputers throughout high school, but upon enter-
ing Cornell University I learned to use their mainframes. In my sophomore year, I finally
found the gateway to BITNET (the "Because It's Time" Network) in some information
another user had left behind in a public computer room. Finding that initial bit of gateway
information was like finding a clue in Adventure — but don't worry, it's not that difficult
any more. From BITNET I graduated to using a computer connected to Usenet (the User's
Netw'ork, generally synonymous with "news"), and around the same time I learned about
the vast Internet, on whose fringes I'd been playing.
After graduating from Cornell in 1989, 1 set up my owm Internet access using QuickMail
for Macintosh. QuickMail w'as overkill for a single person because it's designed to be a
network electronic mail program, so I eventually switched to a more appropriate program
called UUCP /Connect. Several years ago, my wife and I moved from Ithaca, New York
(where we had grown up and where Cornell is located) to the Seattle, Washington area. In
Parti
6 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
the process, I learned more about finding public-access Internet hosts in a place where
you know no one in person. In many ways, the Internet kept me sane those first few
months. My Internet access changed over time, and although I kept using UUCP for
email, I switched first to a SLIP account with Northwest Nexus before writing the first
edition of the book and then, for the second edition, to a PPP account. Several months
after the second edition of this book came out, I finally broke down and got a direct
connection to the Internet. My Macs are permanently on the Internet now.
Throughout this Internet odyssey of the last nine years. I've used the nets for fun, social-
izing, and general elucidation. In the last five years. I've also written and edited a free,
weekly, electronic newsletter called TidBITS. It focuses on two of my favorite subjects: the
Macintosh and electronic communications. TidBITS is both a product and a citizen of the
Internet. It has grown from a 300-person mailing list that once crashed a Navy computer
running old mail software, to an electronic behemoth that lives on every network I can
find — boasting an estimated 125,000 readers in over 55 countries.
So that is the reason I'm writing this book (well, there are those incriminating photo-
graphs of publishing industry VIPs that I have digitized and poised to distribute to the
net at large). Any questions? I hope so, but hold off until you've finished the book. And
for those of you already marking things up with those nasty yellow highlighters, don't;
I promise there is no quiz awaiting you.
Changes
Keep in mind that the Internet changes quickly and constantly; trying to capture it in a
snapshot requires high-speed filn'i. I've got that film, so the image of the Internet that I
present here isn't blurry or out of focus, but it's impossible to cover, or even discover,
everything that deserves to be in Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. Thus, if you want to
keep up with the changes, it's partly up to you to get out on the Internet and see what's
happening. I can help a bit, and I do, with some World Wide Web pages that track the
latest Macintosh Internet programs and other events of importance, but in the end, you
have to decide the extent to which you want to stay up to date.
This book has itself evolved and grown along with the Internet, and it is now in its third
edition. I've left in place the best parts of the first and second editions, inserted some new
ways of explaining the Internet, updated the software discussions to cover the latest
releases, and added in some great new programs that have appeared since the second
edition hit the shelves. I've also reevaluated the utility of some sections, particularly the
appendices, and have taken the bold step of actually removing information that I feel is
no longer useful or appropriate. I've shrunk discussions of many software programs to
capsule reviews to make the book easier to browse. And in general, my editor and I have
tried to tighten up the book. It's too easy for a book to grow uncontrollably, much like a
Microsoft application, and I refuse to submit to the nefarious disease of creeping
featuritis.
Chapter 1 ♦ Welcome 7
The first two editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh distinctly changed my life, for
the better. Tve been asked to speak at conferences, inter\dewed via email and on the
radio, filmed for TV, and fed food that was pre-chewed for my convenience by weasels on
interminable cross-country airplane flights. But the reason I put up with all the hassle is
that I truly love the Internet and believe that it's worth preserving, protecting, building,
and explaining. If I can infect others with my enthusiasm for the Internet via this book, I
think the world becomes a better place. And that's the goal in the end.
Parti
Chapter
2
Why Is the Internet
Ne3.t?
Unless you've just idly picked up this book based on its bright cover while
waiting for your spouse to choose the right gift for Aunt Millie's birthday, you
probably have some sense that you should be interested in the Internet. Given
the Clinton administration's emphasis on a national data highway system,
many a poor reporter has written or broadcast a story on this Internet thing.
Those stories almost always make those of us who live and breathe the Internet
cringe because they almost always miss the point. The stories either crow about
the technological achievement and vast worldwide coverage of the Internet
(while failing to explain that it is definitely not a commercial service staffed by
friendly nerds in white coats, and ignoring its human dimension), or they
provide a gratuitous human interest story about how two people met on the
Internet and got married eleven days later because typing to each other was
such a moving experience. Sure, this stuff happens, but such gee-whiz stories
never touch on the commonplace parts of the Internet: the discussion groups,
information databases, and selfless volunteer work that keeps the whole thing
running. That's a shame, and I vow to avoid that slippery' slope.
But I should be talking about why you should be interested in the Internet,
instead of ragging on the mediocre descriptions from people who apparently
aren't. Keep in mind that I may miss your favorite reason to use the Internet —
10 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
one woman's Brownian motion generator is another man's cup of tea. In addition, re-
member that technology is seldom used for its intended purpose. The Internet started as a
method of linking defense researchers around the country; it has grown beyond that use
in ways its creators never could have imagined.
Electronic Mail
For many people, electronic mail (or email) is the primary reason to get on the Internet;
they simply want to be able to send mail to someone else on the Internet. Once you're on,
though, you're likely to strike up many new friendships and end up with a long list of
electronic correspondents. Because it's quick and easy, email is an excellent way to stay in
touch, even with people whom you regularly talk to on the phone. Even though I talk to
my parents often, I also send them email because it's more appropriate for quick notes.
Email messages are even better than an answering machine for conveying simple infor-
mation. At one point, for example, the local Macintosh user group held steering commit-
tee meetings at my house. I could have called all the steering committee members before
each meeting to remind them about it, but because all I wanted to say was, "Don't forget
the meeting tomorrow night," contacting them was easiest via email.
Email sometimes gains the least likely converts. One friend of mine is best described
as a telephobe — he hates talking on the telephone and only has one at his house, out of
necessity. He had been equally disparaging of computers and email until he was forced to
try it, after which he became an instant email proponent. He discovered that with email,
he no longer had to play telephone tag with coworkers or try to arrange meetings to talk
about simple topics. Email enabled him to work more flexible hours because he didn't
care when his coworkers were present, and their email was waiting whenever he wanted
to read it.
Discussion Groups
A large number of people read and participate in the thirty or so discussion groups, also
called newsgroups, about the Macintosh, and far more people contribute to thousands of
other non-technical discussions. Several years ago, when I went away on a bike trip, my
Macintosh started sounding the Chords of Death and displaying the sad Mac face along
with an error code. My wife couldn't contact me to tell me about it, but she posted a help
message on one of the Macintosh discussion groups. Within a few days she had received
answers from Macintosh experts around the world, all telling her that code meant we had
a bad memory card. (Luckily, the card turned out to be only badly seated.)
Similarly, when we were in the process of buying a car, I started reading appropriate
messages on one of the discussion groups dedicated to talking about cars. The messages
were of some help, but I wish I had known then that there was an entire discussion group
devoted to Hondas, the make we were looking at most.
Chapiter 2 ♦ Why Is the Internet Neat? 11
Software
For many Macintosh users, some of the most immediately useful and interesting things
about the Internet are the file sites. File sites are computers on the Internet that are acces-
sible to everyone (more or less) and store thousands of the latest and greatest freeware and ^
shareware (where you pay the author if you use the program) programs for the Macintosh. 2- internet Neat?
An equal or greater number of file sites exist for other platforms, most notably for the
omnipresent PCs from IBM, Compaq, Dell, and the other 17 million clone makers. Finding
specific numbers is difficult, but I think it's safe to say that thousands of people download
files every day from the most popular archive sites (just another name for file site).
Information at Your Electronic Fingertips
The popularity of email and newsgroups notwithstanding, the massive databases of
information impress some people the most. A couple of years ago, a friend came over
to look at a QuickTime movie of the Knowledge Navigator film clip. The Knowledge
Navigator is ex-Apple CEO John Sculley's idea of what information access will be like in
the future — an anthropomorphic "talking head" that acts as an information agent, search-
ing through massive databases of information on the user's command. The Knowledge
Navigator film portrays a professor preparing for a class discussion about deforestation
in the Amazon rain forest by looking at data retrieved by his electronic agent.
The film is fairly neat, but after watching it, I remembered that I also wanted to show my
friend Wide Area Information Server (WAIS). Using the Macintosh WAIS software, we
connected to WAIS and typed in our query, "Tell me about deforestation in the Amazon
rainforest." After about 10 seconds, WAIS returned a list of 15 articles from various
sources that dealt with just that topic, sorted by relevance. Talk about knocking some-
one's socks off — my friend was staring, mouth open, tongue lolling, and completely
barefoot, so to speak. Although WAIS doesn't have an infinite number of databases, it
does have over 700 (including TidBlTS), and more appear all the time.
Although I have no numbers to back this up, I get the impression that the largest quantity
of raw information is available via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Even if that's not true,
more data is still transferred via FTP than any other method on the Internet, although the
World Wide Web is catching up fast. The freeware and shareware programs for the Mac
that I mentioned above are available via FTP, as are electronic editions of books, newslet-
ters such as TidBlTS, fiction magazines such as InterText, and huge numbers of other files.
Gopher, another method of transferring information over the Internet, is also quite
popular. It's easy to set up a Gopher server — so anyone who has good information and a
dedicated Internet connection can do it. WAIS databases require high-powered comput-
ers, whereas a ten dollar shareware program from an Australian programmer named
Peter Lewis enables someone to set up a Gopher server on a Macintosh (I've done it for
12 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
some friends here in Seattle — it took about an hour). More than 2,300 Gopher servers exist
today, and the information available on them includes things like Macintosh price lists at
major universities (they often contain Apple's prices as well, making them useful for
comparison even if you don't attend a university), Internet statistics, tech support infor-
mation from Apple, and press releases from the U.S. government.
Finally, a vast amount of information appears on a daily basis on the World Wide Web,
a service created by CERN, the high-energy physics research lab in Switzerland. Other
methods of providing information over the Internet have been pretty much restricted to
text until the data is downloaded to a Mac or PC. But the World Wide Web supports text
with fonts, sizes, and styles, graphics within the text, sounds, animations, and movies;
and all of it is interconnected with hypertext links. For many folks with information to
provide to the Internet, the World Wide Web is the way to go. For instance. I've seen Web
pages ranging from a beautiful collection of fractals (some even animated), to a wonderful
museum-style paleontology exhibit at the University of California at Berkeley, to an ex-
tensive set of pages from a group called INFACT Online devoted to a campaign to stop
tobacco companies from marketing cigarettes to children.
The Lemming Factor
Aside from the personal communications, the discussions on every imaginable subject
(and many you'd never imagine), and the databases of information, the Internet is neat for
yet another reason: It's what I sometimes call the "lemming factor." That is, if so many
people from so many cultures and walks of life are connecting to the Internet, something
has got to be there. Don't scoff; no one makes all these people log on every day and spend
time reading discussion lists and sending email. People aren't forced to increase Internet
traffic at a whopping rate of 20 percent per month. They use the Internet because they
want to, and few people are happy when they lose Internet access for any reason. And as
much as "lemming factor" may imply people are getting on Internet because their friends
are, they aren't doing it from peer pressure (well, okay, so I hassled my parents into
getting connected, but they love it now). People connect to the Internet because it is
becoming more than just an elite club of technoweenies — it has become a virtual commu-
nity in and of itself.
The allure of the Internet sets it apart from other communities such as religious, chari-
table, or humanitarian groups. No implied theological punishment exists for avoiding the
Internet, and although its attraction somewhat resembles that of volunteer groups such as
the Red Cross, those organizations often depend on people's belief systems. The Internet
continues to thrive because of the volunteer labor pumped into it; but also important is
the fact that it provides as much information as an individual can handle, and in this day
and age, information is power.
Chapter 2 ♦ Why 1$ the Internet Neat? 13
The Internet is What You Make of It
Whatever advantage you want to take of the Internet, remember two things. First, the
information available on the Internet has generally avoided the processing introduced by
the mass media (although more of the mass media arrives on the Internet constantly as ja
well). If you want some unfiltered opinions on both sides of any issue ranging from the ^ internet Neat?
death penalty to abortion to local taxes, people usually are discussing the issue at length
somewhere on the net. Because of the lack of filtering, you may read a bit more about any
one subject than you do in the mass media.
Second, you get only the information you want. For about a year, my wife and I followed
a weekly routine with the Sunday Seattle Times, First, we'd compete for the comics and
then for the Pacific Magazine, which has in-depth articles. Then we'd settle down: I'd read
the Sports section and the Business section, and my wife proceeded to the Home &
Garden section. Good little stereotypes, weren't we? The point is that I was completely
uninterested in reading at least three-quarters of the tw^o-inch thick stack of paper, and
so was my wife. So why were we paying for the entire thing only to bring it home and
recycle half? A good question, and one that newspaper publishers should get their duffs
in gear and answer.
Tonya and I answered it by ceasing to bother with the Sunday paper. Not only was it a
waste of paper resources, especially considering that we didn't read most of it, but it was
a waste of time to flip through much of the parts that we did read. Instead, I've started
getting the news I want on the Internet, through a combination of mailing lists, news-
groups, and Web pages that cover my interests closely. I can't get all the comics that I'd
like to read yet, but Dilbert from Scott Adams, an Internet-only cartoon called Dr. Fun, and
some of the Slugs! cartoons that my friend Dominic White drew for Internet Explorer Kit for
Macintosh have all appeared in recent months.
The same overkill problem applies to junk mail. I instantly throw out about 90 percent of
the snail mail (the Internet term for paper mail) I get, whereas almost all email 1 get is at
least worth reading.
On the Internet, when all is said and done, I get only what I ask for. Periodically, my
interests change, so I switch things around, but I don't have to read, or even deal with,
topics that either bore or irritate me — such as anything unpleasant happening in Northern
Ireland or Beirut. Try avoiding such topics in the mass media. It's just not possible.
Now that I think of it, there's a third point I want to make about information on the
Internet. Most of it, as I said, is free of media processing. That's because most of the infor-
mation comes from individuals and small groups rather than large publishing conglomer-
ates that own hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the world. Even though
Tm not going to tell you anything about how to set up an Internet machine to provide
information over the Internet, be aware that you as an individual don't necessarily need
14 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
your own machine. You could run a small mailing list from a Mac, and you could easily
post a newsletter or report of some sort to discussion lists without a dedicated machine.
And, if what you want to do requires an FTP site or mainframe that can run mailing list
software, ask around; someone may be willing to provide that sort of access to you. This
is how Tve published TidBlTS for the last five years. As long as you're providing useful
information for free, you'd be surprised how many people may step forward to help you
Champing at the Bit
I know you're all excited about the Internet now that you know why it is so neat. But,
you're probably saying to yourself, "Self, it sure sounds like 1 can do lots of cool things
on the Internet, but just what the heck is this Internet thing, anyway?" Glad you asked
yourself that question because that's precisely what we will talk about next.
Chapter
What Is the
Internet?
What is the Internet? That question is tremendously difficult to answer because
the Internet is so many things to so many different people. Nonetheless, you
need a short answer to give your mother when she asks, so here goes:
The Internet consists of a mind-bogglingly huge number of participants, con-
nected machines, software programs, and a massive quantity of information,
spread all around the world.
Now, let's see if I can put those various parts into some kind of meaningful
context.
Size
To say the Internet is big — in terms of people, machines, information, and
geographic area included — is to put it mildly. How big is it? Let's take a look
and see.
16 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
People
The Seattle Kingdome seats approximately 60,000 people for a sellout Mariners baseball
game (a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the hapless Mariners). That's about the same
number of people who read a single, mildly popular newsgroup on the Internet. If all of
the estimated 30 million people on the Internet (according to some sources; others esti-
mate much lower numbers) were to get together, they'd need 500 stadiums each the size
of the Kingdome to have a party. 1 could calculate how many times that number of people
would reach to the moon and back if we stacked them one on top of another, but I think
I've made my point.
Machines
In the infancy of the computer industry, IBM once decided that it did not need to get into
the computer business because the entire world needed only six computers. Talk about
a miscalculation! Many millions of computers of all sizes, shapes, and colors have been
sold in the decades since IBM's incorrect assumption. An estimated 4.9 million of these
(4,852,000 as of January 1995, for those of you who like the digits) are currently connected
to the Internet. I keep having trouble with these numbers because they change so fre-
quently. In the first edition, I used 1.7 million computers as the basic number. 1 had to
change it to that at the last minute because the manuscript I'd originally sent to Hayden
Books used 1.3 million, the number from a few months before. When we published
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, Second Edition in August of 1994, 1 updated the number to
2.3 million, and here I am, not even a year later, updating to 4.9 million. See Table 3.1,
which lays out the data collected by Network Wizards over a number of years. You can
find the latest version of this data via the Web at:
http://wvAv.nw.com/
Table 3.1
Internet Host Growth
Date
Number of Hosts
January 95
4,852,000
October 94
3,864,000
July 94
3,212,000
January 94
2,217,000
October 93
2,056,000
Note
Chapter 3 ♦ What Is the Internet? 17
Date
Number of Hosts
July 93
1,776,000
April 93
1,486,000
January 93
1,313,000
Information
I can't pretend that the Internet offers more pieces of useful information than a good
university library system, but that's only because a university has, in theory, a paid staff
and funding for acquisitions and development. Information on the Internet is indeed vast,
but finding your way around proves a daunting task. However, neither could I pretend
that finding a given piece of information in a large research library would be any easier
without the help of a skilled reference librarian.
Information on the Internet also changes and seems to appear more quickly than in a
physical library, so you never know what's arrived since you last visited. Also, keep in
mind that Internet information is more personal and fluid than the sort of information in
a library. Although you may not be able to look up something in a reference work on the
Internet, you can get ten personal responses (some useful, some not) to almost any query
you pose.
Geographic Size
Explaining how large the Internet is geographically is difficult because, in many ways,
messages traveling over the network connections don't give a hoot where they are going
physically. Almost every industrialized nation has at least one machine on the Internet,
and more countries come online all the time. But geographical distance means little on the
net. For example, I mail issues of TidBlTS to our mailing list on Monday night. People
down the road from me find it in their mailboxes on Tuesday morning, as do subscribers
in New Zealand and Norway.
Although I don't know if this is still true, several years ago Norway had the highest
per-capita density of Internet machines.
A friend described the Internet as ranging from Antarctica to the space shuttles, from
submarines to battle tanks, from a guy riding a bicycle around the globe to others crossing
oceans in a yacht, from kids in kindergarten to the most eclectic gathering of brains....
Well, you get the idea.
Parti
18 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
Perhaps the best way of wrapping your mind around the Internet is to recall the old joke
about blind men all giving their impression of an elephant based on what they can feel.
Like that elephant, the Internet is too large to understand in one mental gulp (see figure
3.1).
Some people may think of the Internet in terms of the people that are on the net (this is
my favorite way of looking at it). Technical people may insist that the machines and the
networks that comprise the physical Internet are the crux of the matter. Software pro-
grammers may chime in that none of it works without software. Others may feel that the
essence of the Internet lies in the information present on it.
In fact, all of these people are equally right, although as I said, I personally prefer to think
of the Internet as millions of people constantly communicating about every topic under
the sun. The amount and type of information, the hardware and software will all change,
but the simple fact of people communicating will always exist on the Internet.
People — Doing What They Do Best
The most important part of the Internet is the collection of many millions of people,
homo sapiens, all doing what people do best. No, I don't mean reproducing, I mean
communicating.
Chapter 3 ♦ What Is the Internet? 19
Communication is central to the human psyche; we are always reaching out to other
people, trying to understand them and trying to get them to understand us. As a species,
we can't shut up. But that's good! Only by communicating can we ever hope to solve tlie
problems that face the world today. The United Nations can bring together one or two
representatives of each nation and sit them down with simultaneous translations. But via
the wire and satellite transmissions of the Internet, anyone can talk to anyone else on the
Internet at any time — no matter where they live.
I regularly correspond with friends (most of whom I've never met) in England, Ireland,
France, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Australia,
Singapore, Taiwan, Canada, and a guy who lives about 15 miles from my house. (Actu- ^ internet?
ally, my wife and I finally broke down and went to visit the guy up the road, and he's
since become one of our best friends in Seattle and the managing editor of TidBITS.) I've
worked on text formatting issues over the networks with my friend in Sweden, helped
design and test a freely distributable program written by my friend in Turkey, and co-
written software reviews with a friend in New Zealand, who had been one of my Classics
professors back at Cornell. On the net, where everything comes down to the least com-
mon denominator of ASCII text, you don't worry about where your correspondents live.
Although people use many languages on the net, English is the de facto language of the
computer industry, and far more people in the world know English than English speakers
know other languages.
During the Gulf War, while people in the U.S. were glued to their television sets watching
the devastation, people in Israel were sending reports to the net. Some of these described
the terror of air raid sirens and worrying about SCUD missiles launched from Iraq. No
television shot of a family getting into their gas masks with an obligatory sound bite can
compare with the lengthy and tortured accounts of daily life that came from the Israeli net
community.
The Internet also helped disseminate information about the attempted coup in the former
Soviet Union that led to its breakup. One Internet friend of mine, Vladimir Butenko, spent
the nights during the events near the Parliament. When everything seemed to be clear, he
went to his office, wrote a message about what he'd seen, and sent it to the Internet. His
message was widely distributed at the time and even partially reprinted in the San Jose
Mercury News.
Although people on the Internet are sometimes argumentative and contentious, is that
entirely bad? Let's face it, not all the events in the world are nice, and people often
disagree, sometimes violently. In the real world, people may repress their feelings to
avoid conflict, and repression isn't good. Or people may end up at the other extreme
where the disagreement results in physical violence. On the Internet, no matter what the
argument (be it about religion, racism, abortion, the death penalty, the role of police in
society, or whatever else), there are only three ways for it to end. First, and mostly likely,
all parties involved may simply stop arguing through exhaustion. Second, both sides may
20 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
agree to disagree (although this usually only happens in arguments where both sides are
being rational about the issues at hand). Third, one person may actually convince another
that he is wrong; though I doubt this happens all that often since people hate to admit
they're wrong. But notice, in none of these possibilities is someone punched, knifed, or
shot. As vitriolic as many of these arguments, or flame wars, can be, there's simply no
way to compare them to the suffering that happens when people are unable to settle their
differences without resorting to violence.
Most of the time on the net, an incredible sense of community and sharing transcends all
physical and geopolitical boundaries. How can we attempt to understand events in other
parts of the world when we, as regular citizens, have absolutely no clue what the regular
citizens in those other countries think or feel? And what about the simple facts of life such
as taxes and government services? Sure, the newspapers print those info-graphics com-
paring our country's tax burden to that in other countries. But this information doesn't
have the same effect as listening to someone work out how much some object, say a
Macintosh, costs in France once you take into account the exchange rate and add an 18
percent VAT (value-added tax), which of course comes on top of France's already high
income taxes. It makes you think.
If nothing else, that's the tag line I want to convey about the Internet. It makes you think.
Maybe with a little thought and communication, we can avoid some of the violent and
destructive conflicts that have marked world affairs. Many of the Internet resources stand
as testament to the fact that people can work together with no reward other than the
satisfaction of making something good and useful. If we can translate more of that sense
of volunteerism and community spirit back into the real world, we stand a much better
chance of surviving ourselves.
Hardware
Getting down to the technical data, more than 4.9 million computers of all sizes, shapes,
and colors make up the hardware part of the Internet. In addition to the computers are
various types of network links, ranging from super-fast T-2 and T-3 lines all the way
down to slow 2,400 bps modems. T-3 was also the code name for Microsoft Word 6.0 —
but I digress. That often happens when I'm talking about relatively boring things like
networks, because what's important is that the Internet works. Just as with your tele-
phone, you rarely notice its technical side unless something goes wrong.
Computers
The computers that form the Internet range from the most powerful supercomputers from
Cray and IBM all the way down to your friendly local Macintosh and garden-variety PC
clones. You can split these machines into two basic types: host computers and client
Note
Chapter 3 ♦ What Is the Internet? 21
computers. Host computers are generally the more powerful of the two, and they usually
have more disk space and faster connections. Although, I don't want to imply that host
machines must be fancy, expensive computers; Apple's popular FTP site at one point ran
on an aging Mac II (however, it did use Apple's implementation of Unix, called A/UX).
Similarly, client machines also can be large, powerful workstations from companies like
Sun and Hewlett-Packard. Because their task of sending and receiving information for a
single person (as opposed to many people) is more limited, clients generally require less
processor power and storage space than host machines. Basically, it can be a waste to use
a $10,000 Unix workstation as an Internet client (although they can make great client ^
machines, if you have the money to throw around). In my opinion, microcomputers — ^ internet?
Macs in particular — make the best clients. Why spend lots of money and a large amount
of configuration time when an inexpensive, simple-to-set-up Macintosh does the job as
well or better?
For the most part, I look only at client hardware and software in this book. The gritty
details of setting up an Internet host and the many programs that run it aren't all that
interesting to most people, not to mention the fact that I haven't the foggiest idea of how
to configure a Unix workstation to be an Internet host. I'll leave those tasks to the wonder-
ful people who are already doing them. (First rule of the Internet: Be extremely nice to
your system administrator.) If you want to get into the administration end of things,
O'Reilly & Associates publishes a long line of books on Unix and network administration,
including one called Managing Internet Information Services that is a must read for anyone
who wants to run Internet ser\^ers on a Unix machine.
You don't need to use Unix on an Internet host, and in fact, you can run an FTP, Gopher, or
World Wide Web server on a Mac with 7W trouble. But this setup requires a fast and con-
stant connection to the Internet, and again, I'm aiming this book more at users of Internet
information, not information provider wanna-bes. Maybe the next book.
Networks
In basic terms, two computers attached together form a local area network, and as that net-
work grows, it may become connected to other independent local area networks. That
configuration is called an internet, with a small i. The Internet, with a capital /, is the
largest possible collection of inter-connected networks. I could spill the gory details of
what networks are connected to the Internet and whether they are true parts of the
Internet (as defined by using a set of protocols called TCP/IP, or Transmission Control
Protocol /Internet Protocol, the language that Internet machines speak), but that informa-
tion wouldn't be very useful to you.
Note
22 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
An Internet old-thiwr once commented that "Internet" technically only applies to machines
using TCP/IP protocols. He said the term once proposed for the collection of all the intercoih
nected netiuorks, no matter what protocols they used, was "WorldNet." That term seems to
have faded into obscurity— unfortunately, since it's rather apt. Common usage now includes
"Internet" (the safest term, though it's technically inaccurate), "the net" (sometimes
capitalized), and "cyberspace" (a heavily overused term from William Gibson's science-
fiction novel Neuromancer, which, ironically enough, he wrote on a manual h/pczoritcr
Toith images of video games, not the Internet, in his head). Lately, the term "information
superhighway" (an unfortunate term that has spaiV7ied imagery of toll booths, speed bumps,
on-ramps, and road kill, but which means almost nothing in the context in which it's
generally used) is in vogue.
Worrying about the specific network protocol details is generally pointless these days
because many machines speak multiple languages and exist on multiple networks. For
instance, my host machine speaks both TCP/IP as an Internet client and UUCP (Unix to
Unix CoPy) as a UUCP host. My old machine at Cornell existed in both the Internet and
in the BITNET worlds. The distinctions are technical and relatively meaningless to the
end user.
Modems and Phone Lines
For most people using a microcomputer such as a Macintosh, a modem generally makes
the necessary link to the Internet. Modem stands for modulator-demodulator (glad you
asked?), and it enables your computer to monopolize your phone, much like a teenager.
You may not need a modem if you study or work at an institution that has its local area
networks attached to the Internet. If you are at one such site, count yourself lucky and
ignore the parts of this book that talk about finding connections and using the modem.
But remember those sections exist; one day you may leave those connections behind, and
nothing is more pitiful than someone pleading on the nets for information on how to stay
connected after graduation or other significant life changes.
Certain new types of connections, including high-speed ISDN (Integrated Services Digital
Network) may be the death of the modem as we know it. However, ev^en ISDN connec-
tions require a box called a terminal adapter to enable the computer to appropriately pass
data over the ISDN lines. In addition, even for folks with normal telephone line connec-
tions to the Internet, the modem itself may fade into the background — or rather, into the
innards of the computer. It's already possible to almost completely emulate a modem in
software on Apple's Macintosh 660AV, 840AV, and Power Macintosh computers. Eventu-
ally, wireless modems may become common, so the details of making a connection may
fade away entirely. Or at least that's what I hope happens.
Note Note Note
Chapter 3 ♦ Wliat Is the Internet? 23
In an exaggerated show of acronym making, normal phone service is knozon as POTS, or
Plain Old Telephone Service. Don't the people who came up with this have anything better
to do loith their time?
w What Is the
^ Internet?
/ don't want to bash specific manufacturers, but many Macintosh users have had good luck
with modems from Supra and Global Village, and I personally have ozvned modems from
these two companies along with modems from Telebit and Practical Peripherals. Apple's
Express Modem can be a bit flaky at times, but it's one of only tzvo choices for the PowerBook
Duos. (Global Village makes the more expensive PoiuerPort/Merciay Duo.)
It's beyond the scope of this book to tell you what sort of modem to buy, but most repu-
table modem manufacturers make fine modems with long or lifetime warranties. Some
companies sell extremely cheap modems, which often work fine in most cases, but you
may also get what you pay for.
Suffice it to say that you want the fastest standard modem you can lay your hands on, and
as of this writing, the fastest standard means that you want a modem with the magic
word V.34 stamped prominently on its box. That word, which says that the modem sup-
ports a certain standard method of transmitting information, ensures that your modem
talks to most other modems at a high rate of speed, generally 28,000 bits per second (bps).
(This speed, although fast for a modem, doesn't even approach that of a local area net-
work [the standard LocalTalk networking built into every Macintosh runs at 230,000
bps]).
Although v.32bis, the protocol used for 14,000 bps modems, is probably still more common,
I recommend that you buy a 28,000 bps modem, given the choice.
Modem manufacturers often make claims about maximum throughput being 57,600 bps
or higher, but real speeds vary based on several variables such as phone line quality and
the load on the host. Except in laboratory situations and near black holes, modems never
reach the promised maximum speed. The main point to keep in mind is that it takes two
to tango; the modem on either end of a connection drop to the slowest common speed
(usually 2,400 bps) if they don't speak the same protocols. Just think of this situation as
my trying to dance with Ginger Rogers — there's no way she and I could move as quickly
as she and Fred Astaire did.
Note
24 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You may see such terms as v.fast and v.terbo (or v.turbo), but retnember what / said about
needing two to tango. If your provider doesn't use modems that also support these non-
standards, there's no point in wonying about anything other than ii32bis or v.34 for right
now.
Actually, there are more caveats to the modem question than I'd like to admit. Modems
work by converting digital bits into analog waves that can travel over normal phone lines,
and — on the other end — translating those waves back into bits. Translation of anything is
an inherently error-prone process, as you know if you've ever managed to make a fool of
yourself by trying to speak in a foreign language.
A large percentage of the problems that I've seen people have since the first edition of this
book were related to their modems. Modem troubles are exacerbated by the fact that
modem manuals are, without a doubt, the worst excuse for technical writing that I've ever
seen. They're confusing, poorly written, poorly organized, and usually concentrate on the
commands that the modem understands without providing any information as to what
might go wrong. So, as much as I'd like to pretend that modems are all compatible, and
that setting one up to communicate with an Internet host is a simple process, it may not
work right away. If you encounter problems after first checking all the settings to make
sure you've done everything right, you should then check your settings against those in
your modem manual. It's also worth asking your Internet provider for suggestions on
settings for your modem.
I can't tell you how unliappy I am to have written that last paragraph, but it's just how the
world is. You probably didn't get a driver's license without passing a written test, practic-
ing with an adult, taking Driver's Ed, and finally passing a practical test. Perhaps more
apt, you probably weren't able to find anything in a school library until one of the teach-
ers or librarians showed you around. If your modem works on the first try, great! If not,
don't get depressed — not everything in this life is as easy as it should be. If it were, we'd
have world peace.
Anyway, modems connect to phone lines, of course, and residential phone lines are
generally self-explanatory, although at some point you may want to get a second line for
your modem. Otherwise, those long sessions reading news or downloading the latest and
greatest shareware can irritate loved ones who want to speak with you. (Of course, those
sessions also keep telemarketers and loquacious acquaintances off your phone.) I also
thoroughly enjoy being able to search the Internet for a file, download it, and send it to a
friend who needs it, all while talking to him on the phone.
Not all telephone lines are created equal, and you may find that yours suffers from line
noise, which is static on the line caused by any number of things. Modems employ error
correction schemes to help work around line noise, but if it's especially bad, you may
notice your modem slowing down as it attempts to compensate for all the static. When
Note
Chapter 3 ♦ What Is the Internet? 25
it's really bad, or when someone induces line noise by picking up an extension phone,
your modem may just throw up its little modem hands and hang up on you. You can
complain to the phone company about line noise; as I understand it, telephone lines must
conform to a certain level of quality for voice transmissions. Unfortunately, that level may
not be quite good enough for modems, especially in outlying rural areas, but if you're
persnickety enough, you can usually get the phone company to clean up the lines suffi-
ciently.
If yon connect from home and order a second line from your phone company, don't be too
forthcoming about why you want the second line. Although they provide no additional
quality or service, business rates are higher than residential rates. Some phone companies
are sticky about using modems for non-business purposes, which is why this point is worth
mentio7iing. If you connect to the Internet from your office, there's no way around this
situation.
Software
As for the software, the programs that probably come to your mind first are the freeware
and shareware files stored on the Internet for downloading — things such as games,
utilities, and full-fledged applications. I'll let you discover those files for yourself though,
and I'll concentrate on the software available for connecting to the Internet, much of
which is free. Other programs are shareware or commercial, although most don't cost
much. I'll talk about pretty much every piece of software I know about for working on the
Internet in Part IV of this book. Although there's no way for the book's discussion to keep
up with the rate at which new and updated programs appear, 1 provide the latest versions
of all the freeware and shareware programs on my file site, ftp . tidbits . com. Don't
worry about the details now — I'll get to them later in the book.
For the time being though, I want to hammer home a few key points to help you under-
stand, on a more gut level, how this setup all works. First, the Internet machines run
software programs all the time. When you use electronic mail or Telnet or most anything
else, you are actually using a software program, even if it doesn't seem like it. That point
is important because as much as you don't need to know the details, I don't want to
mystify the situation unnecessarily. The Internet, despite appearances, is not magic.
Second, because it takes two to tango on the Internet (speaking in terms of host and client
machines), a software program is always running on both sides of the connection. Re-
member the client and host distinctions for machines? That's actually more true of the
software, where you generally change the term host to the term server, which gives the
broader term clmit! server computing. So, when you run a program on the Mac, say some-
thing like Fetch (an FTP client that retrieves files), it must talk to the FTP ser\'er program
that is running continually on the remote machine. The same is true no matter what sort
Parti
26 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
of connection you have. If you're using a Unix command-line account and you run a
program called Lynx to browse the World Wide Web, Lynx is a client program that
communicates with one or more World Wide Web servers on other machines.
Think of a fancy restaurant where they bring around a dessert cart filled with luscious
pastries at the end of your meal. You're not allowed to get your grubby hands on the food
itself, so the restaurant provides a pair of dessert tongs that you must use to retrieve your
choice of desserts. That's exactly how client/server computing works. The dessert cart is
the server — it makes the information, the desserts in tliis example, available to you, but
only via the client program — the dessert tongs. Hungry yet?
Client application (Mac
Web; Eudora; and so on)
This is you (use
your imagination,
will you?)
Your Internet Provider
Serv'er (a Web
server for example)
Third, FTP and Fetch are the high-level programs that you interact with, but low-level
software also handles the communications betw^een Fetch and an FTP server. This com-
munication at multiple levels is how the Internet makes functions understandable to
humans and still efficient for the machines, two goals that seldom otherwise overlap.
So, if you can cram the idea into your head that software makes the Internet work on both
a high level that you see and a low level that you don't, you'll be much better off. Some
people never manage to understand that level of abstraction, and as a result, they never
understand anything beyond how to type the magic incantations they have memorized.
Seeing the w^'orld as a series of magic incantations is a problem because people who do
that are unable to modify their behavior when anything changes, and on the Internet,
things change every day.
Note
Chapter 3 ♦ Wlmt Is the Internet? 27
Information
More so than any other human endeavor, the Internet is an incredible, happy accident.
Unlike the library at Alexandria (the one that burned down) or the Library of Congress,
the Internet's information resources follow no master plan (although the Library of
Congress, as do many other large university and public libraries, has its catalog and some
of its contents on the Internet). No one works as the Internet librarian, and any free
information resources that appear can just as easily disappear if the machine or the staff
goes away. And yet, resources stick around; they refuse to die — in part because when the ? what is the
original provider or machine steps down, someone else generally feels that the resource is ^ internet?
important enough to step in and take over.
Interestingly, much of the Library of Congress Gopher site was built on volunteer time by
government employees. They created and still maintain the site in addition to their regular
duties on their ozon time, because they believe in the principle of the zoidest possible dissemi-
nation of government (and other non-copz/righted) information to the taxpayer.
Andy Williams at Dartmouth, for instance, runs a mailing list devoted to talking about
scripting on the Macintosh, specifically about AppleScript and Frontier (an Apple event-
based scripting program from UserLand Softu^are that is now starting to become an
especially interesting tool in controlling some Internet programs like Eudora and
Netscape). Andy also originally made sample scripts and other files pertaining to Frontier
available, but he was not able to keep up with the files and still do his real job (a common
problem). Luckily, Fred Terry at the University of Kansas quickly stepped in and offered
to provide a Frontier file site because he was already storing files related to tw^o other
Macintosh programs, QuicKeys and Nisus. (Fred also rescued the Nisus mailing list when
Brad Hedstrom, the list creator and administrator, had to bow out, and Fred's probably a
sucker for stray dogs too.) Fred felt that keeping the information available on the Internet
was important and that the sacrifice was sufficiently small.
Just to fill in more of the story, Fred was actually running a list about AppleScript on his
site, along with lists about QuicKeys and Nisus. When it became clear that discussions
about scripting on the Macintosh overlapped both the AppleScript and the Frontier list,
Fred and Andy got together and created a single list at Dartmouth — today's MacScripting
list — and they've continued to collaborate, with Dartmouth picking up both the Nisus and
QuicKeys lists as well.
Andy's something of a sucker for resources in need of a home, as well. When a man
named Bill Murphy came up with a method of translating our issues of TidBITS into a
form suitable for display on the World Wide Web, he ran into the problem of not having a
sufficiently capable machine to provide that information to the Internet community. Who
should step in but Andy, who offered the use of a World Wide Web server that he runs at
28 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Dartmouth. Between Bill's and Andy's selfless volunteer efforts, the Internet had yet
another information resource for anyone to use.
These are just a few examples of the way information can appear on the Internet. Dam-
ming the Internet's flow of information would be harder than damming the Amazon with
toothpicks. In fact, some of the Internet's resiliency is due to the way the networks them-
selves were constructed, but we'll get into that later. Next, let's look at the main ways
information is provided on the Internet.
The Internet Post Office
You can think of an Internet host machine as a post office, a large post office in a large
metropolitan area. In that post office, huge quantities of information are dispensed every
day, but it doesn't just gush out the front door. No, you have to go inside, sometimes wait
in line, and then go to the appropriate window to talk to the proper clerk to get the infor-
mation that you want. You don't necessarily pick up mail that's been held for you at the
same window as you purchase a money order. Internet information works in much the
same way. But on an Internet host, instead of windows, information flows through virtual
ports (they're more like two-way television channels than physical SCSI ports or serial
ports). A port number is, as I said, like a window in the post office — you must go to the
right window to buy a money order, and similarly, you must connect to the right port
number to run an Internet application. Luckily, almost all of this happens behind the
scenes, so you seldom have to think about it. See Table 3.2 for a list of some common port
numbers.
Table 3.2
A Few Common Port Numbers
Port Number
Description
20,21
File Transfer Protocol (data on 20, control on 21)
23
Telnet
25
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
53
Domain Name Server
70
Gopher
79
Finger
80
World Wide Web
110
Post Office Protocol - Version 3
119
Network News Transfer Protocol
123
Network Time Protocol
194
Internet Relay Chat Protocol
Note Note
Chapter 3 ♦ WImt Is the Internet? 29
I found this information in RFC (Request for Comment) 1340 via the Web or Gopher at
is»internic,net. All of the RFCs that define Internet standards are stored there should
you want more technical information about how parts of the Internet work at their lowest
levels.
So, in our hypothetical Internet post office, there are seven main windows that people
use on a regular basis. There are of course hundreds of other windows, usually used by
administrative programs or other things that people don't touch much, but we won't
worry about them. The main parts to worry about are email, Usenet news, Telnet, FTP,
WAIS, Gopher, and the World Wide Web. Each provides access to different sorts of
information, and most people use one or more to obtain the information they need.
Now that I've said how they're all similar, in the sense of all working through connections
to the proper ports, there are some distinctions we must make between the various
Internet services.
Email and Usenet news (along with MUDs and Internet Relay Chat) are forms of inter-
personal communication — there is always a sender and a recipient. Depending on the
type of email message or news posting, you can use different analogies relating to the
paper world, and I'll get to those in a moment.
All of the information made available through other main parts of the Internet, such as
Telnet, FTP, WAIS, Gopher, and the World Wide Web, is more like information in librar-
ies than inter-personal communication, in the sense that you must visit the library specifi-
cally, and once there, browse or search through the resources to find a specific piece of
information. These services have much more in common with traditional publishing than
email and news.
I should note that, in my eyes, the difference between browsing and searching is merely that
lohen you're browsing, you're not looking for a specific piece of information. Perhaps you
only want some background, or simply want to see what's out there. When you're searching,
you usually have a particular question that you want answered.
No matter what you use, there is still some sort of communication of information going
on. With email and news, it's generally informal and between individuals, whereas with
the rest of the Internet services, the information is usually more distilled — that is, some-
one has selected and presented it in a specific format and in a specific context. None of
these distinctions are hard and fast. Much informal information is available via Gopher,
for instance, and it's certainly easy enough to find distilled information via email. I'll try
to give you a sense of what each service is good for when talking about them later on.
Parti
30 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Electronic Mail
Email is used by the largest number of people on the Internet, although in terms of traffic,
the heaviest volumes lie elsewhere. Almost everyone who considers herself connected to
the Internet in some way can send and receive email.
As I said previously, most personal exchanges happen in email because email is inher-
ently an inter-personal form of communication. All of your email comes into your elec-
tronic mailbox, and unless you let them, no one else can easily read your mail. When you
get a message from a friend via email, it's not particularly different than getting that same
message, printed out and stuffed in an envelope, via snail mail. Sure, it's faster and may
have been easier to send, but in essence personal email is just like personal snail mail.
Because it's trivial to send the same piece of email to multiple people at once, you also can
use email much as you would use snail mail in conjunction with a photocopy machine. If
you write up a little personal newsletter about what's happening in your life and send it
to all your relatives at Christmas, that's the same concept as writing a single email mes-
sage and addressing it to multiple people. It's still personal mail, but just a bit closer to a
form letter.
The third type of email is carried on mailing lists. Sending a submission to a mailing list is
much like writing for a user group or alumni newsletter. You may not know all of the
people who will read your message, but it is a finite (and usually relatively small) group
of people who share your interests. Mailing list messages aren't usually aimed at a specif-
ic person on the list, but they are more intended to discuss a topic of interest to most of
the people who have joined that list. However, I don't want to imply that posting to a
mailing list is like writing an article for publication because the content of most mailing
lists more resembles the editorial page of a newsletter than anything else. You'll see
opinions, rebuttals, diatribes, questions, comments, and even a few answers. Everyone on
the list sees every posting that comes through, and the discussions often become quite
spirited.
The fourth type of email most resembles those "bingo cards" that you find in the back of
many magazines. Punch out the proper holes or fill in the appropriate numbered circle,
return the card to the magazine, and several weeks later you'll receive the advertising
information that you requested. For instance. I've set up my Macintosh to send an infor-
mational file about TidBITS automatically to anyone in the world who sends email to a
certain address (info@tidbits.com, if you're impatient and want to try something right
away). A number of similar systems exist on the Internet, dispensing information on a
variety of subjects to anyone who can send them email. A variant of these auto-reply
systems is the mailserver, which generally looks at the Subject line in the letter or at the
body of the letter and returns the requested file. Mailservers enable people with email-
only access to retrieve files that otherwise are available only via FTP.
Note
Chapter 3 ♦ WJtat Is the Internet? 31
Usenet News
Like email-based discussion lists, Usenet news is interpersonal information — it comes
from individuals and is aimed at thousands of people around the world. Unlike email,
even unlike mailing lists, you cannot find out who makes up your audience. Because of
this unknown audience, posting a message to Usenet is more like writing a letter to the
editor of a magazine or major metropolitan newspaper with hundreds of thousands of
readers. We have ways of estimating how many people reach each of the thousands of
Usenet groups, but the estimates are nothing more than statistical constructs (though
hopefully accurate ones).
Almost everything on Usenet is a discussion of some sort, although a few groups are
devoted to regular information postings, with no discussion allowed. The primary
difference between Usenet news and mailing lists is that news is more efficient because
each machine receives only one copy of every message. If two users on the same machine
(generally multi-user mainframes or workstations at this point) read the same discussion
list via email, getting the same information in news is twice as efficient. If you have a
large mainframe with 100 people all reading the same group, news suddenly becomes 100
times as efficient because the machine stores only the single copy of each message, rather
than each individual receiving her own copy.
In many ways, Usenet is the kitchen table of the Internet — the common ground where no
subject is taboo and you must discuss everything before implementing it. In great part
because of the speed at which Usenet moves (messages appear quickly and constantly,
and most machines don't keep old messages for more than a week due to lack of disk
space), finding information there can be difficult. Think of Usenet as a river, and you must
dip in to see what's available at a specific point in time because that information may
disappear downstream within a few days.
The speed at which messages disappear from Usenet varies by group and by the machine you
use. Each administrator sets how long messages in a group loill last before being expired or
deleted from the system. Messages in newsgroups with many postings per day may expire
after a day or two; messages in groups with only a few postings per week may last a month.
Since complete Usenet traffic is about 200 MB of information each day, you can see why the
short expiration times are essential.
You can, of course, always ask your own question, and you usually get an answer
(though it may be one you don't like), even if it's the sort of question everyone asks.
Common questions are called Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs, and are collected
into lists and posted regularly for newcomers. Luckily, the cost of disk storage is decreas-
ing sufficiently so that some people and organizations are starting to archive Usenet
discussions. These enable you to use search engines like WAIS to go back and search for
information that flowed past in a mailing list or newsgroup a long time ago.
Parti
Note Note
32 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Telnet
Telnet is tough to describe. The best analogy I can think of is that Telnet is like an Internet
modem. As with a standard modem, Telnet enables your computer to communicate with
another computer somewhere else. Where you give your modem a phone number to dial,
you give Telnet an Internet address to connect to. And just like a modem, you don't really
do anything within Telnet itself other than make the connection — in the vernacular, you
telnet to that remote computer. Once that connection is made, you're using the remote
computer over the Internet just as though it were sitting next to you. Tliis process is cool
because it enables me to telnet to the mainframes at Cornell University, for example, and
use them just as I did when I was actually in Ithaca, and not 3,000 miles away in Seattle.
Telnet, FTP, and Gopher can all work as both nouns describing the service or the protocols,
and as verbs describing the actions \/ou perform with them. If Telnet or Gopher is capitalized
in this hook, it's a noun describing the service; if it's in loiuercase, it's a verb describing the
action. (FTP is always capitalized in the book, because it's an acronym.) Unfortunately,
others on the Internet aren't as consistent (and they don't have editors checking on their
text), so this isn't a universal convention.
I realize that I'm supposed to talk about information in this section, but Telnet is sucli a
low-level protocol that it's impossible to separate the information that's available via
Telnet from the protocol itself.
Most people don't have personal accounts on machines around the world (and I never use
the Cornell mainframes any more either), but a number of organizations have written
special programs providing useful information that anyone can run over the Internet via
Telnet.
Say I want to search for a book that's not in my local library system. I can connect via
Telnet to a machine that automatically runs the card catalog program for me. I can then
search for the book I want, find out which university library has it, and then go back to
my local library and ask for an inter-library loan.
Or, for a more generically useful example, if you telnet to downwind . sprl . umich . edu
3000, you reach the University of Michigan's Weather Underground server, with gobs of
data about the weather around the entire country.
Sure you could telnet to the Weather Underground. Or, if you have a MacTCP connection to
the Internet, you could download the fascinating Blue Skies application and get a graphical
interface that makes the weather a lot more interesting, See the chapter in the MacTCP-based
software section entitled "Utilities & Miscellany" for more about Blue Skies.
Note
Chapter 3 ♦ What Is the Internet? 33
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
FTP feels like it's related to Telnet, but in fact that's an illusion — the two are basic proto-
cols on the Internet, but are otherwise unrelated. While Telnet simply enables you to
connect to another remote computer and run a program there, FTP enables you to connect
to a remote computer and copy files back and forth. It's really that simple.
More data is transferred via plain old FTP than by any other method on the Internet, and
it's not surprising because it's a least-common denominator that almost every machine on
the Internet supports. Like Telnet, you must be directly connected to the Internet while
using FTP, although there are a few special FTP-by-mail services that enable you to
retrieve files stored on FTP sites by sending specially formatted email messages to an
FTP-by-mail ser\^er.
There are probably millions of files available via FTP on the Internet, although you may
discover that many of them are duplicates because people tend to want to give users more
than one way to retrieve a file. If a major file site goes down for a few days, it's nice to
have a mirror site that has exactly the same files and can take up the slack.
Mirror sites are important because as the Internet grows, individual machines become
overloaded and refuse to accept new connections. As with anything that's busy (like the
phone lines on Mother's Day, the checkout lines at 5:00 P.M. on Friday afternoons at the
grocery store, and so on) it always seems that you're the one ivho gets bumped or who has to
try over and over again to get through. Don't feel special— hundreds of other people suffer
exactly the same fate all the time. Mirror sites help spread the load.
In the Macintosh world, several sites with lots of disk space (several gigabytes, actually)
store a tremendous number of freeware and shareware programs along with commercial
demos and other types of Macintosh information. If you think your local BBS has many
files, wait until you see the two main file sites for the Mac, mac . archive . umich . edu and
the Info-Mac Archive site currently at sumex-aim.stanford.edu. I would estimate that
between 20 and 100 new files appear in the Info-Mac Archive archive every week —
certainly enough to keep you busy if you enjoy exploring freeware and shareware soft-
ware for the Macintosh.
The vastness of the number of files stored on FTP sites may stun you, but you have access
to a tool that helps bring FTP under control. Archie takes the grunt work out of searching
numerous FTP sites for a specific file. You ask Archie to find files with a specific keyword
in their names, and Archie searches its database of many FTP sites for matches. Archie
then returns a listing to you, providing the full file names and all the address information
you need to retrieve the file via FTP.
Parti
Note Note
34 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If you have MacTCP access to the Internet, you can use a program I included on the disk
called Anarchie, which is an FTP and Archie client program for the Mac. fust ask Archie to
find a file, and when the results come back, double-click on the file to retrieve it. And people
complain about how hard the Internet is!
WAIS
I mentioned using WAIS to search for information about deforestation in the Amazon
rainforest in the preceding chapter, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. WAIS originated
from a company called Thinking Machines, but has now split off into its own company,
WAIS, Inc. Using the tremendous processing power of Thinking Machines' Cormection
Machine supercomputer or another powerful computer, WAIS can quickly (usually under
a minute) return a number of articles to English-language queries, sorted by the likelihood
that they are relevant to your question. WAIS is limited only by the information that
people feed into it.
Last I counted, there were over 700 sources available for searching within topics as
diverse as Buddhism, cookbooks, song lyrics. Supreme Court decisions, science fiction
book reviews, and President Clinton's speeches. For all the sources on non-technical
topics. I'm sure an equal number exist about technical topics in many fields.
People talking about WAIS (pronounced "'ways,'" I hear) tend to use the terms "source,'"
"server," and "database" interchangeably, and so do L
Perhaps the hardest part about WAIS is learning how to ask it questions. Even though
you can use natural English queries, it takes your question quite literally, and only applies
it to the selected sources. So, if you asked about deforestation in the Amazon rainforest
while searching in the Buddhism source. I'd be surprised if you found anything.
Since the rise of the World Wide Web's popularity, WAIS seems to have faded into the
background a bit. It's not that WAIS servers aren't still being used heavily, but they're
being used as search engines behind the scenes, usually through a Web page interface.
Gopher
Gopher, which originated with the Golden Gophers of the University of Minnesota, is an
information browser along the same lines as FTP, but with significant enhancements for
ease of use and flexibility. Numerous sites — over 2,300 at last count — on the Internet run
the host Gopher software, placing information in what are colloquially called gopher holes.
When you connect to a Gopher site, you can search databases, read text files, transfer files.
Note Note
Chapter 3 ♦ What Is the Internet? 35
and generally navigate around the collection of gopher holes, which is itself called
Gopherspace.
Gopher can be quite useful in terms of actually making information available that you
need to answer specific questions. Part of the reason for this opinion is Veronica, and to a
lesser extent Jiighead, which enable you to search through Gopherspace as Archie enables
you to search for files on anonymous FTP ser\^ers.
Veronica and Jughead xoere both named to match Archie {from the Arcliie comics), but
Veronica's creators at the University of Nevada did come up with an acronym as well— Very
Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives, Jughead stands for Jonzy's
Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display. Glad you asked?
Veronica searches through all of Gopherspace, which is useful, although badly phrased
searches (Veronica doesn't use natural English, as WAIS does) can result in hundreds of
results. Jughead searches a subset of Gopherspace and can thus be more accurate, though
less comprehensive.
One of the special features of Gopher is that it provides access to FTP (and Archie) and
WAIS, and can even run a Telnet program to provide access to resources only available
via Telnet. Gopher also can work with other programs to provide access to special data
types, such as pictures and sounds. When you double-click on a picture listing in Gopher,
it downloads the file and then runs another program to display the picture. This sort of
integration doesn't generally work all that well if all you have is Unix command-line
access to the Internet.
World Wide Web
When I wrote the first edition of this book in mid-1993, the World Wide Web existed, but
lacked a good client program on the Macintosh. I managed to write a paragraph or two
back then about NCSA Mosaic, the Web browser that was officially released a few months
after I finished the book, but there simply wasn't much on the Web at that point. Now
there are at least four well-known Web browsers for the Macintosh alone, and I'm sure
more are on the way. Everything about the Web has changed since that first edition. It's
become much, much larger, and the resources available on it have become incredibly
diverse and far more useful.
You may see the World Wide Web referred to as simply "the Web," "W3," or sometimes as
"WWW."
Parti
36 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The Web brings a couple of very important features to the Internet. First, unlike Gopher
or anything else, it provides access to full fonts, sizes, and styles for text, and can include
images onscreen with no special treatment. Sounds and movies are also possible, though
often too large for many people to download and view. Second, the Web provides true
hypertextual links between documents anywhere on the Web, not just on a single ma-
chine. For those unfamiliar with hypertext, it's a powerful concept that enables you to
navigate flexibly through linked pieces of information. If you read a paragraph with a link
promising more information about the topic, say results from the last Olympic Games,
simply click on the link, and you'll see the results. It really is that simple, and the World
Wide Web enjoys the highest profile of any of the Internet services.
There are more machines whose names start with www than anything else now, and the
Web is in second place and rapidly catching up with FTP in terms of the amount of data
transferred. Nothing touches it in terms of pure sexiness, although many Web ser\^ers that
you see suffer from the same problem that many publications did after the Macintosh
made desktop publishing popular: they're designed by amateurs and are ugly as sin.
Summing Up
I've tried to answer one of the harder questions around, "What is the Internet?" The
simple answer is that the Internet is a massive collection of people, machines, software
programs, and data, spread all around the world and constantly interacting. That defini-
tion, and the explication I've provided about the various parts of the Internet elephant,
should serve you well as we look next at the history of this fascinating beast.
Chapter
4
The Internet
Beanstalk
Unlike the Greek goddess Athena, the Internet did not spring from the head
of some Zeusian computer scientist. It was formed by a process of relatively
rapid accretion and fusion (but keep in mind that this industry is one in which
computer power doubles every few years). In 1980, there were 200 machines
on the Internet — that number is now about 4.9 million. The grain of sand that
formed the heart of this giant electronic pearl came from the U.S. Department
of Defense (DoD) in 1969. I'm pleased to be older than the Internet, having
been born in 1967, but Tm not enough older to talk authoritatively about world
conditions at that time. So, please bear with my second-hand retelling.
Cold War Network
In the 1950s, the Russian Sputnik program humiliated the United States. To
better compete in the space race, the U.S. space program (at the time under the
auspices of the military) received major government funding. That funding
came from the DoD under its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARP A).
In the early 1960s, the space program left the military to become NASA, but
ARPA remained, and as with many government programs that have seemingly
lost their reason to exist, so did its funding. What to do with the money?
38 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The DoD was, at that time, the world's largest user of computers, so J.C.R. Licklider and
others proposed that ARPA support large-scale basic research in computer science. ARPA
didn't originally require that the research it supported be either classified or directly
related to military applications, which left the door open for far-reaching research in
many fields. In 1963, ARPA devoted a measly $5 to $8 million to its computer research,
the Information Processing Technologies Office (IPTO), first under Licklider, and then
subsequently under the 26-year-old Ivan Sutherland, who had developed an early (per-
haps the earliest) graphics program at MIT. After Sutherland, a 32-year-oId named Robert
Taylor headed IPTO. Taylor managed to double IPTO's budget at a time when ARPA's
overall budget was decreasing, and even admitted to diverting funds from military-
specific projects to pure computer science.
Around this time, the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) began
connecting various computers around the country at sites performing research for ARPA.
Computers were expensive, and sharing them was the only way to distribute the re-
sources appropriately. Distribution of cost via networks proved to be an important force
in the development of the Internet later on as well. Proponents like Taylor ensured the
early survival of the fledgling ARPAnet when it was all too vulnerable to governmental
whimsy.
In 1969, Congress got wind of what ARPA was up to in terms of funding basic research
with money from the defense budget. Three senators, including the still-active Edward
Kennedy, pushed through legislation requiring that ARPA show that its programs were
directly applicable to the military. In the process, ARPA's name changed to reflect its new
nature; it became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. (Years
later, the name changed back to ARPA again, just to confuse the issue.) Bob Taylor
became entangled in some unpleasant business reworking military computers in Saigon
during the Vietnam War and left DARPA shortly thereafter. He was succeeded by Larry
Roberts, who played a major role in getting the then tw^o-year-old ARPAnet up and
running. Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, wrote at the time:
At present some 20 major computer centers are linked on the two-year-old ARPAnet. Traffic
on the Net has been venj slow, due to delays and difficulties of translation betiueen different
computers and divergent projects. Use has recently begun to increase as researchers travel
from center to center and want to keep in touch with home base, and as more tantalizing
sharable resources come available. How Net usage will evolve is uncertain. There's a curious
mix of theoretical fascination and operational resistance around the scheme. The resistance
may have something to do with reluctance about equipping a future Big Brother and his
Central Computer. The fascination resides in the thorough rightness of computers as
communication instruments, which implies some revolutions. (Stewart Brand, in II Cyber-
netic Frontiers, Random House, 1974)
So if DARPA had to justify the military applications of its research, what survived? Well,
the ARPAnet did, and here's why: As leaders of the free world (pardon the rhetoric), we
needed the latest and greatest methods of killing as many other people as possible. Along
Chapter 4 ♦ The Internet Beanstalk 39
with offensive research must perforce come defensive research; even the DoD isn't so foolish
as to assume we could wage a major war entirely on foreign soil. For this reason, the
tremendous U.S. interstate highway system served double duty as a distribution medium
for tanks and other military hardware. Similarly, the Internet's precursor was both a
utilitarian and experimental network. ARPAnet connected both military research sites
(hardware was expensive and had to be shared) and was an experiment in resilient net-
works that could withstand a catastrophe — including, in the imaginations of the DoD
planners of the day, an atomic bomb.
Interestingly, the resiliency of the ARPAnet design, as carried down to the Internet, has
led some to note that the Internet routes around censorship as it would route around
physical damage. It's a fascinating thought, especially in regard to Stewart Brand's earlier
comment about Big Brother. If anything, the Internet actually has served to reduce the
threat of a Big Brother, because it makes communication between people so fluid and p The internet
unrestricted. But, I anticipate myself. hh
Gateways
As a result of the machinations described previously, the Internet Protocol, or IP (the
second half of TCP/IP) was created. Essentially, the point behind IP systems is that each
computer knows of, or can determine, the existence of all the others, and thus route
packets of information to its destination via the quickest route. While doing this, they are
able to take into account any section of the network that's been bombed out or has merely
been cut by an over-enthusiastic telephone repairperson. This design turns out to work
well; more importantly, it makes for an extremely flexible network. If your computer can
get a properly addressed packet of information to a machine on the Internet, that machine
will worry about how to deliver it, translating as necessary. That's the essence of a
gateivay — it connects two dissimilar networks, translating information so that it can pass
transparently from one to the other.
In the early 1980s, the military began to rely more and more heavily on the ARPAnet for
communication, but because the ARPAnet still connected a haphazard mix of research
institutions, businesses doing defense work, and military sites, the military wanted their
own network. And so the ARPAnet split in half, becoming the ARPAnet and the Milnet
(Military Network). The ARPAnet continued to carry traffic for research sites, and even
though the military now had its own Milnet, traffic passed between the ARPAnet and the
Milnet by going through gateways.
The concept of gateways proved important in the history of the Internet. Alongside the
development of the Internet came the development of a number of other, generally
smaller, networks that used protocols other than IP, such as BITNET, JANET, and various
others. These also included some like Usenet and CSNET that didn't care what protocols
were used. These networks were regional or dedicated to serving certain types of ma-
chines or users.
40 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Perhaps the largest driving force behind the Internet is that of the need to connect with
other people and other networks. The grass is always greener on the other side of the
fence, and gradually gateway sites sprung up so that email could pass among the differ-
ent networks with ease.
Usenet
Tm going to take a brief break from the Internet itself, because at approximately the same
time the ARPAnet split, a host of other networks came into being, probably the most
interesting of which was Usenet, the User's Network.
Usenet started in 1979, when some graduate students decided to link several Unix com-
puters together in an attempt to better communicate with the rest of the Unix community.
The system they created included software to read news, post news, and transport news
among machines. To this day, that simple model continues, but whereas once two ma-
chines were on Usenet, today there are hundreds of thousands. The software that trans-
ports and displays Usenet news now runs on not just Unix machines, but on almost every
type of computer in use on the networks. The topics of discussion have blossomed from
Unix into almost any conceivable subject — and many inconceivable ones. Like all the
other network entities, Usenet quickly grew to be international in scope and size.
Unlike many of the other networks, Usenet truly grew from the bottom up, rather than
from the top down. Usenet was created by and for users, and no organization — commer-
cial, federal, or otherwise — had a hand in it originally. In many ways, Usenet has pro-
vided much of the attitude of sharing that exists on the Internet today. In the past, you
usually got a Usenet feed (that is, had another machine send news traffic to your machine)
free of charge (other than your telephone charges) as long as you were willing to pass the
feed on to someone else free of charge. Due to commercial pressures, the days of the free
feeds are essentially no more, but the spirit of cooperation they engendered remains in
much of what happens on the Internet.
I don't want to imply that Usenet is this happy, carefree network where everything is free
and easy, because in many cases it's a noisy, unpleasant network that exists because of the
utility of some of the information that it carries. Despite the attitude toward sharing, the
survival of Usenet is due in large part to the resourcefulness of network administrators
at major sites. Faced with mounting telephone charges for long distance calls between
Usenet hosts, these administrators found a way to carry Usenet news over the TCP/IP-
based Internet rather than just the previous modem-based UUCP connections. Thus, they
prevented the costs of carrying Usenet from coming to the attention of the bean counters
poised to strike unnecessary expenses from their budgets. The TCP/IP connections of the
ARPAnet, and then the Internet, were already paid for. So, by figuring out how to carry
Usenet over those lines, the network administrators managed to cut their costs, keep users
happy, and save Usenet from itself in the process. In other words, Usenet may be an
anarchy, but it wouldn't stand a chance without some occasional help from high places.
Chapter 4 ♦ The Internet Beanstalk 41
BITNET
Shortly after Usenet took its first faltering networked steps, Ira Fuchs of City University of
New York and Greydon Freeman of Yale University decided to network their universities
using IBM's then-new NJE communications protocol. Although this protocol later ex-
panded to support Digital Equipment's Vaxen running VMS and even some implementa-
tions of Unix, the vast majority of machines on BITNET (the "Because It's Time" network)
have always been IBM mainframes. Fuchs and Freeman made their connection in the
spring of 1981. BITNET grew rapidly, encompassing over 100 organizations on 225
machines by 1984, and by 1994 reaching the level of 1,400 organizations in 49 countries
around the world. Most BITNET sites are at universities, colleges, and other research
institutions. ^
The internet
BITNET has always been a cooperative network; members pass traffic bound for other ^ Beanstalk
sites free of charge, and software developed by one has been made available to all. Unlike
Usenet, however, BITNET developed an organizational structure in 1984. This took the
form of an Executive Committee, made up of representatives of all the major nodes on
the netw^ork. Also in 1984, IBM presented a large grant that provided initial funding for
centralized network support services. This grant, coupled with the fact that most of the
machines on BITNET were IBM mainframes, gave rise to the erroneous rumor that
BITNET was an IBM network. In 1987, BITNET became a nonprofit corporation. In 1989,
it changed its corporate name to CREN, the Corporation for Research and Educational
Networking, when it merged its administrative organization with another of the parallel
educational networks, CSNET (the Computer+Science Network). Today, BITNET is in
something of a decline, due in large part to the nonstandard NJE protocol in an increas-
ingly IP world.
NSFNET
The next big event in the history of the Internet was the creation of the high-speed
NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network) in 1986. NSFNET was developed to
connect supercomputer sites around the country. Because supercomputers are terribly
expensive, the NSF could afford to fund only five (and even then they received some
major financial help from companies like IBM). With this limited number, it made sense
to network the supercomputers so that researchers everywhere could use them without
traveling great distances. At first, the NSF tried to use the ARPAnet, but that attempt
quickly became bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape.
The NSF therefore decided to build its own network. Merely connecting the five super-
computer sites wasn't going to help the vast majority of researchers, of course, so the NSF
created (or used existing) regional networks that connected schools and research sites in
the same area. Then those netw^orks were connected to the NSFNET.
42 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
To quote from W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, "U you build it, they will come." Perhaps not
surprisingly, once all of these networks were able to communicate with one another, the
supercomputer usage faded into the background. Other uses, most notably email, became
preeminent. One of the important features of the NSFNET was that the NSF encouraged
universities to provide wide access to students and staff, so the population of and traffic
on the net increased dramatically.
In 1987, the NSF awarded a contract to a group of companies to manage and upgrade the
NSFNET. This group was made up of IBM, MCI, and Merit Network, which ran the
educational network in Michigan. The group dealt with the massive increase in traffic by
replacing the old lines with much faster connections.
Eventually the NSFNET had entirely supplanted the ARPAnet, and in March of 1990, the
ARPAnet was taken down for good, having played the starring role for 21 years. Simi-
larly, another national network, CSNET, which had connected computer science research-
ers around the country, closed its electronic doors a year later, all of its traffic having
moved to the faster NSFNET.
NREN
The NSFNET is all fine and nice, but in many ways it discriminated against "lower"
education — two-year colleges, community colleges, and the much-maligned K-12
schools. To save the day, then-Senator A1 Gore sponsored a bill, passed in December of
1991, called the "High-Performance Computing Act of 1991." Gore's legislation created a
new network on top of (and initially using) the NSFNET. This new network is called the
NREN, for National Research and Education Network. Along with providing even faster
speeds, the NREN specifically targets grade schools, high schools, public libraries, and
two- and four-year colleges. In working with the thousands of people who subscribe to
TidBITS, I see a lot of email addresses, and it's clear to me that these educational institu-
tions are joining the Internet in droves. A day rarely passes when I don't see sometliing
from someone whose address clearly labels him or her as a teacher at a grade school or
even a student in a high school.
Alert readers probably have noticed that NREN looks a lot like CREN, and in fact, the
acronyms are similar — with reason. CREN recognizes the need for an integrated National
Research and Education Network. In fact, as the IBM-created NJE protocol gradually
disappears in favor of the more powerful and popular IP, CREN has said it will disband,
merge with NREN, or cooperate with it as appropriate — though only when NREN exists
with access rules, funding, and usage policies that allow a clean transition. Currently,
CREN feels that the NREN does not provide consistent policies regarding these issues.
Chapter 4 ♦ The Internet Beanstalk 43
Who Pays?
More and more of the Internet is being created and run by commercial organizations. All
a commercial provider has to do is to pay for its part of the network, just as universities
pay for their connections and government departments pay for theirs. The difference is
that unlike universities or government organizations, commercial providers want to make
money, or at least break even, so they in turn sell access to their machines or networks to
other providers or to end users.
The gut reaction to the commercialization of the Internet from the old-timers (who
remember when you could get a Usenet feed merely by asking) is often negative, but most
people believe that the Internet must accept commercial traffic. In part, this response is
true because the only alternative to accepting commercial traffic is actively rejecting it,
and no one wants to sit around censoring the Internet, were that even possible. In many
ways, the question has already been decided because there are now more com addresses
than edu addresses, the previous champ.
10
a
The Internet
Beanstalk
Commercialization also allows small organizations to create the equivalent of wide-area
networks that previously only large businesses could afford. A company such as Micro-
soft can spend the money to install an international company network, but few companies
are so large or so wealthy. Many may not need such an international network, but they
may need enhanced communications. Email can be a powerful medium for business
communication, just as it is for personal communication. And, if transferring a file via FTP
or email can save a few uses of an overnight courier, the connection can pay for itself in
no time.
In addition, whereas in the past you had to work at a large business or university to gain
Internet access, it has become far easier for an individual to get access without any such
affiliation, although the costs are, of course, more obvious. Easier independent access
couldn't have happened without increased participation by commercial interests.
The commercialization issue has another side. The U.S. government still controls the
NREN, which is a large portion of the Internet and connects many of the major educa-
tional sites. As more commercial providers get into the business, the government is
gradually relying more and more on them rather than duplicating their effort. This move
has much support because the commercial providers can then make money, which is
what they want to do, and the government can save money, which is what many people
want the government to do.
The concern is, of course, that these commercial providers will want to make too much
money and will raise rates significantly or start charging usage-based fees rather than the
flat-rate fees that have been more common for this type of service. I don't worry too much
about this concern, mostly because the competition is heavy in the Internet field, and
Note
44 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
prices are seldom high in extremely competitive fields. In addition, it's not as tliough
the federal funding was necessarily a significant part of the Internet budgets at many
institutions.
When these issues started to come to a head in 1994, M. Stuart Lynn, then the head of
Cornell Information Technologies, noted that the Internet is a global network, and some
countries, such as New Zealand, already have usage-based pricing. So even if the NREN
moved to usage-based pricing, most of the global Internet wouldn't be affected. Stuart
Lynn also commented that the federal subsidy is trivial to many institutions, and at
Cornell it is equivalent to two cans of beer per student per year. In other words, even if
Cornell had to rely on a completely commercial network (which may or may not be
usage-based), its costs would not change noticeably.
It's worth noting that people like flat-rate fees for most things (telephone service and cable
service come to mind), and in the past most personal Internet accounts from commercial
providers have been usage-based, with a recent trend toward flat-rate service in the past few
years. I believe the increasing number of flat-rate SLIP and PPP accounts from various
commercial providers was helped in part by the first edition of this book, with its flat-rate
offer for SLIP access from Northwest Nexus. I'm unazuare of any other widely available flat-
rate accounts that predate the offer from Northwest Nexus. Of course, I could be wrong, but
I like to think I had a positive influence.
The trick is to remember that someone always pays for the Internet. If you have a free
Internet account thanks to your school, remember that the institution is paying for that
connection and funding it in part from your tuition. If your workplace offers Internet
access and doesn't limit your use of it, consider that a benefit of working there, along with
retirement and health benefits. And an increasingly large number of people, like me, pay
directly, usually somewhere between $5 and $30 per month. Sure beats cable television.
Remember how I previously said that the NSFNET was created to carrj' supercomputer
traffic but soon found itself being used for all sorts of tasks? That's another basic principle
to keep in mind about how the Internet is funded. The network links were created for a
specific reason (supercomputer access), and because of that reason, the money necessary
to create and maintain those links was allocated in various budgets. Thus, when traffic
unrelated to the supercomputer access travels on the same network, it's piggy-backing on
the lines that have already been paid for out of existing budgets. So it seems free, and as
long as the ancillary traffic doesn't impinge on the supercomputer access, no one is likely
to complain. It's much like using your friend's Mac's processing power to generate
processor-intensive pictures when he's not using his Mac. As long as your use doesn't
slow down the things he wants to do, he probably won't mind, especially if it helps you
finish your work sooner. But, if your use prevents him from doing his own work, he'll
probably become less generous about it.
Chapter 4 ♦ The Internet Beanstalk 45
So, when the NREN moves completely from governmental to private control, most people
won't see the difference because their organizations would continue to foot the bill,
especially if the costs didn't change. To poorly funded organizations such as grade
schools and public libraries, which may only be able to afford their Internet connections
with help from the government, the danger is there. Oh, and where do you think the
government gets the money? Taxes, of course. So you end up paying one way or another.
Politics
After all of this discussion, you're probably confused as to who runs what on the Internet.
Good, that's the way it should be, because no one person or organization runs the Internet
as such. I think of the Internet as a collection of fiefdoms that must cooperate to survive.
The fiefdoms are often inclusive as well, so one group may control an entire network, but
another group controls a specific machine in that network. As a user, you must abide by
what both of them say, or find another host.
I don't mean to say that there aren't some guiding forces. The NSF exercised a certain
influence over much of the Internet because it controlled a large part of it in the NSFNET.
Thus, the NSF's Acceptable Use Policies (which state that the NSFNET may not be used
for "commercial activities") became important rules to follow, or at least keep in mind,
and I'll bet that many commercial providers used them as a starting point for creating
their own less restrictive, acceptable use policies.
Several other important groups exist, all of which are volunteer-based (as is most every-
thing on the Internet). The Internet Architecture Board, or lAB, sets the standards for the
Internet. Without standards, the Internet wouldn't be possible because so many types of
hardware and software exist on it. Although you must be invited to be on the lAB, anyone
can attend the regular meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. The
lETF's meetings serve as a forum to discuss and address the immediate issues that face
the Internet as a whole. Serious problems, or rather problems that interest a sufficient
number of volunteers, result in working groups that report back to the IETF with a
recommendation for solving the problem. This system seems haphazard, but frankly, it
works, which is more than you can say for certain other organizations we could probably
name.
Other networks undoubtedly have their controlling boards as well, but the most interest-
ing is Usenet, which has even less organization than the Internet as a whole. Due to its
roots in the user community, Usenet is run primarily by the community, as strange as that
may sound. Every network administrator controls what news can come into her machine,
but she can't control what goes around her machine. The converse applies as well — if a
sufficient number of network administrators don't approve of something, say a news-
group creation, then it simply doesn't happen. Major events on Usenet must have
sufficient support from a sufficient number of people.
Parti
46 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Of course, some people's votes count more than others. These people are sometimes
called net heavies because they often administer major sites or run important mailing lists.
The net heavies consider it their job (who knows how they manage to keep real jobs with
all the work they do here) to keep the nets running smoothly. Even though they often
work behind the scenes, they do an excellent job. Shortly after I started TidBlTS, for
instance, I was searching for the best ways to distribute it. I wasn't able to run a mailing
list from my account at Cornell, and TidBlTS was too big to post to a general Usenet
group every week. After I spoke with several of the net heavies, they allowed me to post
to a moderated newsgroup, comp . sys . mac . digest, that had up to that point been used
only for distributing the Info-Mac Digest to Usenet.
If you want to get involved with what organization there is on the Internet, I suggest that
you participate and contribute to discussions about the future of the nets. Gradually,
you'll learn how the system works and find yourself in a position where you can help the
net continue to thrive.
You should keep one thing in mind about the Internet and its loose controlling structure:
It works, and it works far better than do most other organizations. By bringing control
down to almost the individual level but by requiring cooperation to exist, the Internet
works without the strong central government that most countries use and claim is neces-
sary to avoid lawlessness and anarchy. Hmm...
The Internet makes you think, and that's good.
Oh, and remember Bob Taylor, one of the early heads of ARPA's IPTO? Several years
later he helped found Xerox PARC, which employed luminaries such as Douglas
Engelbart (inventor of the mouse), Alan Kay (a current Apple Fellow), Bob Metcalfe
(inventor of Ethernet), and Larry Tesler (who was, and may still be, head of Apple's
Advanced Technology Group). And, of course. Xerox PARC was where Steve Jobs saw
the Xerox Alto workstation and its graphical interface, and at that moment, in many
respects, the Macintosh was born.
The Future
I hope this chapter has provided a coherent view of where the Internet has come from,
along with some of the people and networks that were instrumental in its growth. After
any history lesson, the immediate question concerns the future. Where can we expect the
Internet to go from here?
I'm an optimist. I'm sure you can find someone more than happy to tell you all the
horrible problems — technical, political, and social — facing the Internet. I don't hold with
such attitudes, though, because something that affects so many people around the world
didn't appear so quickly for no reason. In one way or another, I think most people under-
stand on a visceral level that the Internet is good, the Internet is here to stay, and if they
want to be someone, they would do well to get access today and contribute in a positive
fashion. Of course, books like this one only encourage such utopian attitudes.
Chapter 4 ♦ The Internet Beanstalk 47
In any event, I predict that the Internet will continue growing at an incredible rate. You
might make an argument for the rate of growth slowing from its 15 percent per month
rate based on the fact that it's silly to assume that anything can continue to grow at such a
breakneck speed. A naysayer also might point at the massive influx of novices as endan-
gering the Internet, or point at the increased level of commercialization as a major prob-
lem. I feel that such growth is self-propelling and that bringing more people and re-
sources onto the Internet only further fuels the expansion. I think that growth is good —
the more people, the more resources, the more opinions, the better off we all are.
I also expect to see the Internet continue to standardize, both officially and informally. At
lower levels, more computers will start to use IP instead of BITNET's NJE or the aging
UUCP protocols. It's merely a matter of keeping up with the Joneses, and the Joneses are
running IP. At a higher level, I think that using various network resources will become
easier as they start migrating toward similar interfaces. Just as it's easy to use multiple
applications on a Mac because you always know how to open, close, save, and quit,
so it will be easier to use new and enhanced services on the Internet because they
will resemble each other more and more. Even now, people rely heavily on network
conventions such as prefixing site names to indicate what services they provide, like
ftp.tidbits.com for FTP, gopher.tidbits.com for Gopher, and www.tidbits.com for
the World Wide Web.
And yes, I fully expect to see the Internet become increasingly commercial, both in terms
of where the service comes from and in terms of the traffic the Internet carries. However,
we must remember the old attitudes about commercial use of the Internet. In the past,
commercial use was often acceptable if it wasn't blatant, was appropriately directed, and
was of significant value to the readers. In other words. I'll be as angry as the next person if
I start receiving automatically generated junk email every day, just as I receive junk mail
via snail mail. If such things start happening, the course of action will be the same as it
always has been; politely ask the originator to stop once, and then, if that doesn't work,
flame away — that is, send back an outrageously nasty message.
Even though I'm optimistic, I know that problems will occur. For example, consider the
so-called Green Card debacle. In the spring of 1994, the husband and wife law firm of
Canter & Siegel posted a blatantly commercial message advertising a green card lottery
and immigration services. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that they posted it
to 5,000 Usenet newsgroups, an act called spamming. Discussions about Celtic culture,
Macintosh communications (where I first saw it), and Washington state politics were all
interrupted, along with thousands of others completely apathetic about anything to do
with immigration. Or at least they were apathetic until they were bludgeoned repeatedly
with Canter & Siegel's post. All of a sudden, everyone cared a great deal about immigra-
tion, and sent 30,000 flame messages (more than 100 megabytes of text) to the offenders.
That many messages was far more than Canter & Siegel's provider, Internet Direct, could
handle, and their machine went down like a boxer on the wrong end of a knock-out
punch.
I
The Internet
Beanstalk
48 biter net Starter Kit for Macintosh
The aftershocks keep coming, with Internet Direct suing Canter & Siegel for violating
acceptable use policies (it seems that Canter & Siegel never signed the terms and condi-
tions form) and for the detrimental effect the post had on business. In return Canter &
Siegel counter-sued for loss of business, claiming some ludicrous percentage of the
messages were requests for more information (though they refuse to provide any verifi-
able data). Needless to say, Internet Direct disabled their account immediately, and details
about Canter & Siegel's history began to surface. They'd been kicked off of other provid-
ers for similar smaller-scale posts in the past, they'd been suspended from the bar in
Florida in 1987 for conduct the Supreme Court of Florida deemed "contrary to honest,"
and so on. Canter & Siegel garnered a huge amount of press (most of it negative, but as
the saying goes, "I don't care what you say about me as long as you spell my name
right."). They even announced in a newspaper interview that they were setting up a
company to provide services to other companies who wanted to flood Usenet with
advertising, and they wrote a book (which has received awful reviews) about how to
advertise on the Internet. That's a bit like Bonnie and Clyde writing a book about bank
security.
The Canter & Siegel fiasco raises the question of how the Internet should be policed. In
the past, and the present, any transgression has been dealt with much as it might have
been in the perhaps-fictional view of the American Old West. Everyone takes justice into
his own hands, and if a few innocents are hurt in the process, well, it was for the greater
good. When Canter & Siegel spammed Usenet, thousands of people spammed them back.
This process is more commonly known as mail bombing. Mail bombs are generally small
Unix programs (before you ask, I don't know of any for the Mac and don't condone their
use in general) that simply send a user-configured number of messages (using a specified
file as the message body) to a given address, potentially ensuring that none of the mail
bomb messages come from real addresses. A better solution came from a Norwegian
programmer, who created a spambot (his term, not mine) program that somehow figures
out which newsgroups Canter & Siegel spammed (yes, it has happened again, although
on a smaller scale each time) and bounces the spamming message back to them, along
with a short note daring them to sue him, since he's in Norway.
Frontier justice sounds like great fun, especially when slimy lawyers are on the other end,
but it raises some interesting issues. Mail bombing a machine doesn't affect just that
machine — it affects many of the machines nearby on the Internet. In the case of a public
machine like Internet Direct's indirect - com, it also hurts an innocent business and
hundreds of innocent users who also use that machine. And, although the Internet as a
whole can deal with the occasional mail bomb attack, if such things happened every day,
they would seriously impair Internet communications. Such possibilities raise the specter
of regulation, something that most Internet users disapprove of (though certain usage
regulations are built into the service agreements of almost every Internet provider for
liability reasons). So, will the government get involved and lay down the law about
inappropriate Internet use? Probably not. The people who must do the regulation are the
Chapter 4 ♦ The Internet Beanstalk 49
providers themselves — there's no way to prevent everyone from retaliating from such
spam attacks as Canter and Siegel's, so the best place to stop them is at the level of the
providers. They can simply refuse to give problem users an account or remove accounts
when abuse occurs. But the government itself? I certainly hope not.
I don't believe that the Internet will ever be governed to a much greater extent than it now
is (at least in the U.S.), simply because I don't believe it's feasible. How can you govern
something that spans the globe or police something that carries gigabytes of data every
day? The U.S. government could easily ban pornographic postings, say, but how does that
affect someone from a different country? Or how does that affect U.S. users retrieving the
pornographic images from another country? Remember, the Internet can just route
around censorship. It's all very confusing, and it will be some time (if ever) before the
government understands all of the issues surrounding the Internet sufficiently to produce
reasonable legislation. Of course, that begs the question of unreasonable legislation, but ? The internet
that's always a fear. ^ Beanstalk
The way the government as a whole currently views the Internet reminds me a bit of the
joke about how to tell if you have an elephant in your fridge. The answer is by the foot-
prints in the peanut butter — it's the middle of the night, and the government is standing
at the open door, yawning and blinking at those massive footprints. Luckily, different
parts of the government are starting to wake up, which should help dispel the dangerous
ignorance that has marked certain past government Internet actions.
For example, there was the Steve Jackson case, in which the Secret Service completely
inappropriately confiscated the computer systems of a popular publisher of role-playing
games. The damage award from that case enabled Steve Jackson Games to create an
Internet provider called Illuminati Online (io.com). Perhaps the greater problem now
with the government's view of the Internet is that it seems more concerned with regulat-
ing occasional outrageous behavior than with using the power of the Internet to further
the public good. Personally, I prefer my government to be more interested in helping than
in regulating. Of course, then there are the people who would prefer tl'iat the government
just stayed out of the way, but somehow I doubt that will happen any time soon.
Past and Future — Next, the Present
I've tried to give a glimpse of the history of the Internet, from its first stumbling steps as
the military- and research-based ARPAnet to the swift NSFNET and NREN, along with
the commercial providers of today. If nothing else, it's worth noting that those who ignore
history are condemned to repeat it, and by paying attention to the mistakes of the past,
perhaps we can avoid making them again. The future will also bring new problems and
new opportunities, but for the moment we can only speculate as to what those may be.
But put all that out of your mind, because the next chapter takes you on a tour of the
Internet of today.
Chapter
5
Exploring the Internet
Before I dive into the "hows'' of the Internet, I'd like to take a chapter to discuss the
"whys." I spend most of the rest of this book talking about how to do things — how to use
Anarchic to retrieve a file, how to use Eudora, how to use NewsWatcher, what's neat
about MacWeb, and so forth. But, it makes sense to spend a little time first talking about
why you would want to use email, read news, talk to people via IRC (Internet Relay
Chat) or browse the World Wide Web.
The problem with attempting to give you a sense of why you would want to do these
things is that for most readers, I don't know you personally. Any specific example I give
may or may not interest you, so I instead talk about the things that 1 do on the Internet
and the ways I use the Internet in my daily life. Although you and I are undoubtedly
interested in different subjects, if you just sit back in a comfortable chair and read through
this chapter, I hope you'll get a better sense of what life on the Internet is really like.
Don't sweat the details in this chapter. It's not meant to be technical at all and you've got
the rest of the book to answer any niggling details. If you don't recognize a program
name or an Internet service, don't worry about it — just mentally note it for later and come
back after you've read the later chapters. As odd as it may sound, consider this chapter a
work of fiction. It's not that the subject matter is contrived, but instead that you must
suspend disbelief and just flow with the text. After all, you don't worry about how Ian
Fleming enabled his fictional master spy, James Bond, to drive a car that could metamor-
phose into a submarine, right?
52 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
After you've read the rest of the book and have gotten on the Internet, you might come
back to this chapter and see if you can perhaps duplicate some of the examples that
follow. You never know what you might find when you retrace the steps of a fictional, or
not so fictional, character.
Actually, I've already written an entire book, called Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh,
devoted to this less-technical subject matter. My co-author on that book. Bill Dickson, has
graciously agreed to join me for a chapter to go over some of the material we cover in
Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh. Hi, Bill!
Bill: Hi, AdamI Hello, ReadersI
Adam: You'll notice that we've just switched over to a dialog format. In keeping with the
more informal nature of this setting, we'll present this chapter as a sort of extended
conversation. It worked well in Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh, as we were able to draw
on each other's experience with different aspects of the Internet, and interject with ques-
tions where appropriate.
Bill: Think of it as a quick spin around the Internet in the back seat of
a Macintosh convertible, with Adam and I sitting up front and taking
turns driving. Kick back and relax, and we'll see if we can show you
something interesting.
Adam: And I suppose the first thing we'll do is what most people do when they get their
first car — we'll go visit some friends.
People
Adam: News stories about the Internet love to quote big numbers, since big numbers
impress people. I suspect that's mostly because few people have ever sat down and
counted to a million, or even much past a hundred. Today's youth probably consider it
sufficient to watch that many digits flash by on the computer screen, muttering that if
Zeus had intended us to count to a million, he would have given us a million toes — and
wouldn't that have made "This little piggy" difficult?
So, you hear a lot about how there are millions of computers on the Internet and how the
growth rate increases at some 15 percent per month. It's equally chic to talk about the
hardware and software and the myriad of protocols, each with an acronym like FTP or
HTTP, all of which mean little to the average person, even to tlie average Internet user.
Let's face it, a vast number of people drive cars in the world, and Tm willing to bet that
almost none of them know how powerful their cars' engines are in terms of horsepower.
Here's the important fact about the Internet: people.
The Internet is about people. The actual number is unknown, and relatively unimportant,
other than the number of zeros, since estimates place the population of the Internet
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 53
between 20 and 50 million people worldwide. That's a large pool, and there's a pretty
good chance that someone you know, or even many people you know, have access to the
Internet.
Bill: The first thing many of us do when we arrive on the Internet is
look for our friends. It's only natural; it's harder to make new friends
than to stick with old ones. So, we sit down at our computers, try to
imagine who we know, anywhere in the world, who might be able to receive
email over the Internet, and we start hunting around for them.
This can be a great deal harder than it sounds. Paradoxically, the
Internet— one of the greatest tools for the exchange of information de-
vised since Gutenberg started mashing ink onto paper with wooden blocks—
can't keep track of who is using it. Or rather, it could, but nobody's
ever bothered to tell it how. So, silly as it may sound, there is no
comprehensive directory of Internet users. Not even close. Some sites
maintain their own directories, but the information can be pretty dated,
and you've still got to know where to look.
Adam: To illustrate this fact, we're going to look around for Bill. Now, you may think this
is strange, even pointless, as Bill is obviously pretty close by or he wouldn't be able to raid
my fridge for beer while writing this chapter.
Bill: Hey! It's my beer, bucko!
Adam: What dark secrets does the Internet hold? Perhaps the Whois server can provide
some details on one William R. Dickson, possibly exposing his sordid past as the illegiti-
mate son of a third world dictator. Let's find out.
First, we'll try a little Unix program called Whois. It turns up a William E. Dickson, but no
William R. Dickson. Even if it had found him, all that Whois provides is an address, phone
number, and email address, which aren't enough to suspect illegitimacy (see figure 5.1).
i(i:-3z. dlckson®rs.internic.net (1 98.41. 0.5):lUhois
Dickson, Daold G. <00010) (614) 223-3134
Dickson, David 0. <DGD11) (614) 223-3134
Dickson, Mike <MD61> dp-jukd® tour 1 sin . tdoc . iexas . gov <512) 320-9445
Dickson, Scott <SD153) SCOTTeONTEK.COM <714) 768-0301
Dickson, Mi II lam E. <UED) BILLewCIU.EDU <818) 398-2357
The InterNIC Registration Services Host ONLV contains Internet Information
<Hetttiorks, RSN's, Domains, and POC's).
Please use the whois server at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information.
a
Figure 5.1 Probably not the illegitimate son of a third world dictator; also, not our man.
You must be careful when finding people in this manner since some names are relatively
common. You might be embarrassed if you send an intensely personal letter to an old
flame you located on the Internet, only to find out that you'd found somebody else's
old flame.
Exploring the
Internet
54 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
But I don't give up easily, and I do want to see if I can turn something up on Bill. 1 like to
use Gopher, which is a program created by the University of Minnesota to provide access
to all sorts of information on the Internet. Gopher knows a number of ways to search for
people, so first I'm going to try something called Netfind (see figure 5.2).
Phone Books
Internet-iuide e-mail address searches
0 !nt#rn*t Oophtr ©1991-1993 University of Mlnnesote.
0 Internet Gopher ©1 991 -1993 University of Minnesota.
G]Phone books at other institutions
CD Internet -wide e-mail address searches
dl X.500 Gateway
ClWHOIS Searches
D Gopher to Netfind Gateway
Bl Netfind search for Internet e-mail addresses overview
@ Netfind server at AARNet (Melbourne, Australia)
@ Netfind server at Catholic University, Santiago, Chile
@ Netfind server at OpenConnect Systems, Dallas, Texas
@ Netfind server at Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
@ Netfind server at University of Alabama, Birmingham
@ Netfind server at the University of Colorodo, Boulder
(3 USENET contributor e-mail addresses
B) USENET contributor e-mail addresses overview
@ X.500 directory
Bl X.500 directory overview
Phone books at other institutions
0 Internet Gopher ©1991-1993 University of Minnesote
|§) About Phone Books. . .
B) About using the directory search. . .
(3 Search All the Directory Servers. . .
CDAU the directory servers in the world
C] Africa
CDAsia Pociflc
Q Europe
C]Middle East
C]North America
CD South America
CD International Organizations
CDX.500 Gateway (eiperimental)
Bl whois information and server list
-A- ■ UJHOIS Searches
0 lnt*rn*t Goph«r ©1991-1993 University of Mirmesoie.
B about the net domains
(3 Energy Sciences Network
[3 Network Solutions, Inc. (non-MILNET/non-PX)
^Network Solutions, Ihc.
±
I
♦
m
Figure 5.2 The many tentacles ofG.O.P.H.E.R.
Netfind only works if your target works at a large business or university, and Bill's
workplace — a Popular Copy Shop — isn't included. Strike two (Whois was strike one).
Next up is something called X.500, which sounds like a robot but turns out to be a large
white pages database maintained by some organization in England. It wants tons of
information, including department and organization, that Bill doesn't have, so that's a
strike as well. Ah, but now I see something that searches Usenet contributor email ad-
dresses, and 1 know that Bill occasionally posts to the Usenet newsgroups — maybe that
will find him. Blast it. Gopher reports, "Could not connect," which means that the ma-
chine that runs that service or the network to that machine is down — maybe it's frozen.
Strike four. Internet machines go down fairly frequently, but don't worry about it — they
usually come back up in a few hours or the next day, so there's no need to panic and ask if
the site has gone away. Just try again later.
I'm beginning to worry that I can't find Bill at all on the Internet. I know he exists, since he
raids my fridge, but is it possible that he has erased all trace of his existence from the nets,
in an attempt to cover up his horrible past? Hm, I just found an item called something like
"Search all tlie directory servers in the world." Unfortunately, it doesn't know of any
Dicksons. Hey, wait a minute, it doesn't know about any Smiths, either. I wonder what
world it's on? Strike five.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 55
Next up is a service called Veronica which knows how to search through all Gopher
databases in the world (or at least, a lot of them) to find files matching the search term. I
start a Veronica search on "Dickson" and am immediately rewarded with lots of...
information that I don't want, including reviews of Gordon Dickson's books and a report
(co-authored by a professor I knew) about computers in a dorm at Cornell University,
Clara Dickson Hall. It's a small world, but, sigh, strike six (see figure 5.3).
Dickson 1
0 Internet Gopher © 1 99 1 - 1 993 Uni ver sity of Minnesota .
0 Dtckson, THE NEW POLHICS OF SCIENCE
DDickson,D.ff ._CoUection
0|D. Bruce Dickson
Dickson County, TN
[^Dickson County
01 Gordon R. Dickson
0) Subject: Re: Voice mail security (Dickson, RISKS-13.44)
0X3270. od.dickson
0Desonctis G., Dickson G. W.: Computer Graphics As Decision Support
0 Dickson G. ff., Desonctis G., McBride D. J.: Understanding the Effec
0 sfdef_Gordon_R._Dlckson
0 Dickson ,Gordon_R .
0 Dickson ,Gordon.R .
0 Dickson .Gordon
0 Andrew Dickson White: Warfare of Science with Theology
0 Andrew Dickson White: Warfare of Science with Theology
0 dickson
0dicksor^ ^
Hi y VlW Cp||itt:ters_.in. Residence Halls: T he Dtc kson
0 Jane Dlckson-Gilmore
CUDickson township, Manistee County
0 dickson HELP! I my backtick key won’t work in xterm
0 dickson Re: Under the Tarnished ...
0 dickson Re: Under the Tarnished ...
0 David P. Dickson
0NA/^E: JAMES D3EKSDN
0T - AIRWDRTHINESS DIRECTIVES CNT Award No. 2753S. AMT $170,011. DT
0C H Dickson (person)
0Lily Dickson (person)
0 Ron Dickson (person)
0Tom Dickson (person)
0 Dickson. Gordon .gz
O
Figure 5,3 No shortage of Dicksons out there, still not our man.
This is beginning to annoy me. Two outs later, and my reputation as an Internet guru is at
stake. I have one last trick to find some record of Bill on the Internet. I know he uses a
Macintosh, and thus very well may read and contribute to the Info-Mac Digest, which is a
discussion list about all things Macintosh. I also happen to know that the entire list is
archived and indexed in WAIS, which stands for Wide Area Information Servers, and
Parti
56 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
contains many massive databases of information on all sorts of topics. Last I checked,
there were over 700 databases in WAIS, so I'm going to search in a database that collects
Macintosh information for some sign of Bill (see figure 5.4).
Figure 5 A Captured at last — the elusive Bill Dickson.
Adam: You readers can't see this because I didn't want to embarrass Bill by showing his
posting in public, but take my word for it, the selected posting and some of the others in
figure 5.4 are from Bill, and it comes complete with his email address.
Bill: ArghI Found me!
Adam: I assure you that it isn't always this hard. On the other hand, it isn't always this
easy, either. Sometimes finding people works immediately and at other times it's almost
futile. Don't worry, just don't rely on these methods. I certainly don't. The telephone is
almost always the most reliable method of finding someone's email address — ^just call and
ask them.
Net Alter Egos
Adam: Superman, Batman, the Black Cat, Spiderman, Phoenix — all of these comic book
heroes and heroines shared one feature other than great bodies and skintight uniforms
that showed every curve. They all had alter egos who could mix in normal society with-
out anyone else's realizing their true identities. One minute, mild mannered reporter
Clark Kent was being brow-beaten by Lois Lane the next minute (and a phone booth
later). Superman was saving the world from the latest crazed supervillain. Bruce Wayne
and Batman, Peter Parker and Spiderman... Can anyone who has read comic books not
have wanted an alter ego at some point? Our alter egos could do what we didn't want to.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 57
and would be stronger, smarter, and always ready with a clever comeback to any insult
from dastardly villains of every ilk.
The Internet doesn't change your physical appearance or abilities, but because of the lack
of visual interaction, it enables you to portray yourself in any manner you so choose.
Some people might become crusaders for truth and justice, albeit in a single discussion
list, whereas others might turn into psychotic lunatics in a subconscious rebellion against
abusive parents or whatever. I doubt that most people change all that radically in their net
personas, but keep in mind that you can never know what any given net citizen is like in
person, without a face-to-face meeting.
There is another phenomenon that relates to this concept of net alter egos — that of ampli-
fication. Because the Internet enables any single person to send a message to tens of
thousaiids of other people around the world and to maintain intellectual discussions with
numerous people on a number of different topics, the Internet amplifies the individual, or
enables her to do far more than any single person could do outside of the Internet.
The Internet thus enables the individual to become more important and more influential ^
than would otherwise be possible in real life. Of course, the extent to which this happens
is directly related to the level of interest and utility of your postings. Those who do good
stuff are respected, whereas those who merely clog the Internet with garbage are univer-
sally reviled. Well-known, yes, but infamous.
Bill: There's something about the Internet that makes some people cut
loose a little bit. Not everybody; Adam's email, for instance, conveys
his real personality fairly accurately.
Adam: I'm not sure if he's flattering me or being subtly underhanded. Must be his back-
ground as the illegitimate son of a third world dictator.
Bill: We'll never know, will we? But, many people have an "electronic
personality" that is distinctly different from their "real" personality.
It bothers me when people put quotation marks around words that don't
need them, so let me assure you that I mean it in this case. The question
that arises here is, given that the pressure of face-to-face interaction
(and the possibility of embarrassment that goes along with it) are
largely absent on the Internet, do people behave more or less naturally
when they communicate this way?
Well, the answer, of course, is both. There, that clears it right up,
doesn't it?
Let's take as an example one form of human interaction that's in abundant
supply on the Internet: flirtation. People love to flirt electronically 1
Since it's so unlikely that you'll ever actually meet the target of your
wiles, there's no fear of rejection; since you're judged entirely by
your words (and skillful use of smileys), you don't need to worry about
your weight or your hair. So, what you'll find is that people who
couldn't possibly force themselves to buy somebody, anybody, a drink in
58 In ter net S tarter Ki t for Macin tosh
your typical cocktail bar become remarkably fluent in the language of
romance when you put them behind a keyboard and monitor. Which is the
real person? Hard to say. Obviously, the talent for personal interaction
is there, but that talent seems to take a vacation when there's another
person around to actually interact with.
Likewise, you'll find people on the Internet telling total strangers
things they'd never say to many of their friends if they had to say them
face-to-face. Incredibly personal information will find its way into your
email from surprising sources. People are willing to bare their souls,
revealing aspects of themselves you'd never see in person.
There also are people who would be polite in person, but who may, since
they need not worry about getting punched in the mouth, sound off in an
abrasive manner about anything that bothers them— which frequently turns
out to be rather a lot.
This stuff is all very interesting and could probably be the subject of
many studies involving mazes and cheese and spilled ink. But there's
another sort of alter ego you'll encounter on the Internet, and that's
the deliberate role of an actor. People actually construct a part for
themselves to play, and present that character as their network personal-
ity. Some do so as a disguise, playing the role as if it were a real
person. Others make no secret of the fact that they are playing a part.
The role may be played for the network at large, in discussion groups and
correspondence, or only for a specific group of people in some corner of
the Internet where such role-playing is the norm.
This is one of the most fascinating things about the Internet for me, and
I've wholeheartedly participated from time-to-time. I currently play
several roles, including a six-foot anthropomorphized pickle in a virtual
community called FurryMUCK, a nigh -omnipotent (but highly irresponsible)
Author in the Author's Altiverse of Superguy Digest, and a Supreme Court
Justice on the Politics list. It may sound weird to you, but it all makes
perfect sense to each of those three groups of people.
Adam: Bill?
Bill: Yes?
Adam: You're really strange.
Bill: Yes. But lovably so. Net personalities can manifest in some unusual
ways, even if you don't turn into a giant walking pickle. Sometimes it
takes the form of an affected quirk: there are three people on the Poli-
tics list who refuse to use capital letters. One of them explained her
reasons to me; she is a relatively shy person, and feels that lowercase
conveys her personality more accurately by implying a small, quiet speak-
ing voice.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 59
Adam: Although most people are extremely pleasant in email because they know that
email lacks the body language and intonations of normal speech, there are exceptions. I
suspect that most of these occur simply as a matter of limited time to answer email
messages, or perhaps as a subconscious response to the frustration of being asked the
same question over and over again. I once received over a hundred copies of the same
message from different TidBlTS readers, all of whom forwarded it to me because it raised
some serious questions about an article I had written. I had actually seen the message
before publishing the article, but failed to mention that fact within the article itself, so I
shouldn't have been the slightest bit upset with any of the individuals who tried to warn
me about a potentially bad situation. Nonetheless, I was a bit peeved at having to deal
with over a hundred of these messages, so I decided to write a single reply that was
sufficiently generic, and then to send it back to each person. That allowed me to stay
pleasant, whereas if I had had to reply to each message individually, by the end I would
undoubtedly have been writing "You're wrong — and probably stupid. -Adam." That's
not a particularly nice way to respond to someone who was just trying to help, and it
seldom helps to be testy.
Bill: I've got a specific example. Norman is a long-standing member of
the Politics discussion list, to which I've belonged on-and-off since,
oh, 1988 or 1989. Norman's politics are almost always diametrically op-
posed to mine, and he's extraordinarily outspoken about them— sometimes
to the point of offending many list members. He can be abrasive, and more
than a few people have called him obnoxious.
Adam: He sounds like real winner.
Bill: Well, early in my career on Politics, he and I got into a nice little
row over something I can't even remember anymore. It was extraordinarily
heated online, flames going back and forth like there was no tomorrow.
Neither of us was especially civil. So you can imagine my surprise when the
phone rang one day, and there at the other end of the line was Norman.
We talked some, and he was surprisingly pleasant. We talked about the car
I was about to buy, life in general, a bit of political stuff, things
like that. Although I still disagreed with him strongly, I found it hard
to dislike him after that.
Basically (as later correspondence with him suggested), I think he just
likes to argue. The volatile arguments on the Politics list are fun for
him. Not that he doesn't believe what he's saying, he does; but he gets a
blast out of intense argument, and writes accordingly. It's his Internet
personality.
Adam: Of course, these examples prove nothing, since it's equally common for people to
interact better remotely than they do in person. There have been a number of occasions on
which I've conversed quite happily with someone via email, and then, when the time
came to meet them, found that I wasn't all that fond of them. Usually, the meeting also
dampened later email conversations, since it's difficult to communicate with someone
you've met without recalling your impressions of that meeting.
Parti
60 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
In one respect, I like this facet of Internet communication more than any other, because it
says that when we communicate purely on a conscious, intellectual level, we can often do
so far better than when we're staring into each other's faces. I see the Internet as impor-
tant not because of the information available on it, but because of the ways it opens
channels of communication between people who would never otherwise talk due to
barriers of language, geography, religion, or even philosophy.
It's interesting, because people can find almost any excuse to avoid talking to one another
in person, whereas online you can't pry them apart wdth an electronic crowbar. Although
I won't pretend that talking on the Internet could solve the world's problems, the model
of communication where anyone can say anything and is allotted attention commensurate
with the coherence and interest of the message, is one I would love to see more of in the
world.
Bill: Net personalities are part of life on the Internet, and you get
used to them. Eventually, you begin to learn where you can expect to find
certain kinds of personalities, much in the way that you learn which bars
to visit on a Saturday night to find your kind of crowd.
The personalities you'll encounter will be many and varied. People can be
pretty much anything they want to be on the Net. Superheroes are favor-
ites, along with many other fictional characters. Some people even choose
the names of real, more famous people. This, of course, raises a little
question. If you're chatting on the Fly Fishing channel on IRC, and sud-
denly "Madonna" signs on, how do you know it's not... well, it couldn't
really be... Nah.
Could it?
Celebrities
Adam: I once watched a multi-part PBS television series called "Fame in the Twentieth
Century." It used fabulous old photographs, newspapers, and newsreel footage to make
the point that although initially an event might give someone fleeting fame, only the mass
media could provide lasting fame. In the process of working its way through each decade
of the twentieth century, the show examined the lives of people like A1 Capone, who was
addicted to his media-reflected fame, Charles Lindbergh, who tried to escape it, only to
become all the more famous for attempting to avoid the spotlight, and even Madonna,
whose fame is the result of being one of the most skilled self-promoters in the world
today.
How does this all apply to the Internet? I'm not completely certain, except to note that the
concept of fame seems to translate directly to the Internet as another medium of informa-
tion exchange. The icons of popular culture are starting to appear in various ways on the
Internet, which is an interesting process to note in its own right, since that which makes
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 61
one popular in People very well may turn you into a laughingstock on the Internet. This is
not to imply that the Internet rejects all the heroes of popular culture, or that there are no
home-grown Internet legends. Both traditional celebrities and Internet celebrities exist on
the nets, but the Internet being what it is, you can never quite predict how people will
react to the arrival of a celebrity.
Bill: There's no telling how many celebrities are lurking on the
Internet. Some say Harry Anderson of Night Court fame is out there some-
where on the Internet, possibly reading rec. arts. magic. Rush Limbaugh is
on CompuServe, and Tom Clancy supposedly is connected through America
Online. Of course, if Harry Anderson has an America Online account, does
that mean he uses the Internet, or is even aware that he can send mail to
it? Not necessarily.
It's sort of interesting, seeing who chooses to make him- or herself
known. You generally won't find big-name mass-appeal celebrities, but you
can find many, many people who would be considered celebrities in certain
circles. Game designers and writers can often be found getting feedback
on the Internet by mingling with the people who buy and play their games.
I wouldn't know them if I tripped over them, but they're well known in
the gaming community. On the Mac newsgroups, asking a question about a
program will often bring you an answer from its author.
Adam: While some people have brought their fame to the Internet, there are a number of
people whose fame has yet to spread beyond the Internet. In the Macintosh world of the
nets, one of the most famous net denizens, John Norstad, hails from Northwestern
University. Although he no longer works on it except when events require him to, John is
best known for his free anti-virus program called Disinfectant. John created Disinfectant
in response to early Macintosh viruses (evil little programs designed to reproduce them-
selves within other files on your computer, making you feel unclean, and sometimes
causing damage in the process) and continued to improve it over the years. It has become
a commercial-quality piece of software, and being free, is something that I recommend
that every Macintosh user have and use periodically.
More recently, John turned his attention to his current project, a Macintosh program
called NewsWatcher that enables Macintosh users with full Internet access to read and
reply to messages on Usenet, which is home to the many thousands of newsgroups, or
discussion lists, on almost every imaginable topic. NewsWatcher had actually been
started, and then dropped, by Steve Falkenburg, a programmer from Apple. John picked
up the program from Steve and enhanced it significantly, turning it into what I feel is the
best of the Internet newsreaders on the Macintosh. Once again, NewsWatcher remains
completely free to users everywhere, and although he retains final control over what goes
in, John has had help from numerous people on the nets. In essence, then, NewsWatcher
has become a community project, something to which any programmer can contribute
and which any Macintosh user connected to the Internet can use and enjoy.
Parti
62 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
In real life, John works at Northwestern University, so I asked him via email just why he
works on projects like Disinfectant and NewsWatcher and if he minds being an Internet
celebrity. Til let him answer those questions in his own words.
John Norstad: That's a hard question, and I get asked it a lot. I'll try to give a serious answer, at
the risk of being pretentious.
I am passionate about free software. For me, developing free software in my spare time is more than
just a hobby. I'm also passionate about the Mac. It's so incredibly clear to me that the Mac is the
very best computer anywhere, period. I don't understand zuhy there's any controversy at all about
this. I'm also passionate about the revolutionary potential of the Internet, and the Mac's role on the
Internet. It has certainly changed my life, and with the right softzvare and services and access, it
can change other people's lives, too.
The best kind of programming is an act of artistic creation. Truly great programs are zoorks of art.
They have beauty and elegance and truth and purity. They are much, much more than just a
random collection of features. Writing this kind of program is much, much more than just "soft-
ivare engineering. "
For me, the only zoay to even attempt to create this kind of softzvare is to have total freedom and
complete control over the eiztire development process. My best programs are the ones I've zvritten
on my own time, not as ofpcial projects as part of my job.
I've discovered over the 30 years I've been a programmer that as soon as money is involved in any
zoay with the software I write, I in some zoay lose some significant amount of control oi^er the
softzvare. By developing free softzvare, I retain complete control. I don't have to respond to market
pressures, or to often-misguided customer complaints and requests, or to lazvyers or marketing
people, or to bosses, or to magazine reviezvers, or to shipping deadlines, or to finmtcial pressures, or
to anyone or anything else. If you don't like one of my free programs, tough. I'll give you double
your money back.
There's no question that the extent to zvhich my programs are good and even begin to approach
being in any sense the zvorks of art I zvant them to be is because of this freedom.
In short, "free" software = "freedom" for the softzvare creator. For me, this freedom is zuhat it's all
about. Sure, I'd like to be rich, but I've got enough money to support my family zvell, and it's more
important to have the freedom.
Programming as an act of creation is an addiction. The only reason I zorite Mac programs is
because of this urge to create. I don't do it because my bosses tell me to do it, or for money, or as a
public service, or for fame. I do it to feed the monkey on my back.
This is nothing new or startling or unique. Any good programmer zvho really cares about his or her
zvork zvill tell you much the same thing.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 63
I'm very fortunate to find myself in a working environment that makes this all possible. 1 have a
good job with good pay, and Northwestern gives me a very large amount of control over my zvork
and encourages and supports my independent projects like Disinfectant and NezvsWatcher. Feio
people are so lucky.
Adam: And as far as being a celebrity?
John Norstad: It's very much a mixed blessing.
1 get zuay too much mail and zvay too many phone calls. Way too many people zuant me to do zoay
too many things. Email is sometimes like a Chinese zuater torture. I have to keep up with it every
day, or I get hopelessly behind. If I leave tozon for three days or a zueek, when I get back it takes a
zuhole day or tzvo just to get caught up. I sometimes have to be ruthless and quite rude zvhen I
reject requests for help or requests to speak or requests for interviezvs or requests for whatever. This
is unpleasant, because I don't like being nasty to people.
But overall, becoming a minor "celebrity" in the Mac zuorld (a somewhat larger than average fish
in a rather small pond) has been very pleasant. The very best thing that has hapipened is that it has
given me the of>portunity to become friends and colleagues zvith some of the best Mac programmers
in the zvorld. It's also very pleasant to have people recognize and appreciate my work. I really enjoy
getting simple thank you notes via email and postcards from all over the world and having strang-
ers come up to me and thank me at conferences and all that sort of thing.
Azuards are nice, too. I went to San Francisco to receive the MacUser Editors' Choice John J.
Anderson Distinguished Achievement award. It zoas a very fancy black tie affair. I got to give a
short speech, and I brought home an incredibly large and beautiful Eddy statue. This zoas definitely
the thrill of a lifetime.
Finally, I have to admit that my "celebrity" status is pretty cheap, and is entirely due to being
lucky enough to have zoritten Disinfectant in the late 1980s, just zvhen the virus problem zoas
becoming more serious and seriously over-hyped by the press. Sure, it's a very good program, and
I'm a veiy good programmer, and viruses are a serious problem, and my program is a serious and
successful attempt to deal zvith the problem, but it's still just one program, and I'm still just one
programmer. There are many, many developers in the Mac zvorld who have done much more zvork
and much better zvork and much more significant work and are much smarter than I am, but zvho
haven't gotten anyzvhere near the same recognition as I have.
Finding Your Niche
Adam: The first task that faces any Internet newcomer, or nezvbie, in Internet parlance, is
finding the group of people with whom you want to hang out. This of course assumes
that you're not an antisocial hermit who doesn't want to have anything to do with other
people. Don't become discouraged if it takes you some time to find just the right place. If
you were anything like me, it took years during adolescence to do the same thing in real
life, and I can guarantee that it won't take that long on the Internet.
Parti
64 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
As with anything on the Internet (and in real life, for that matter), many ways of finding
your future group of friends exist. They range from extremely low-tech methods, such as
asking someone in person or looking in a book, to the high-tech methods of running
complicated searches in WAIS databases.
Bill: One of my main social groups on the Internet is the Politics list,
a group devoted to the discussion of current events, political theory,
and all those other government -related topics that make you unpopular at
parties.
Adam: If the conversation turns to education reform in Nicaragua, you know it's not
going to be one of those parties where people balance spoons on their noses.
Bill: Well... don't be too sure. I wound up as part of the Politics crowd
through a rather complicated series of events. Around this time in my
college career, I had signed up for a Political Science minor, and I was
quite fascinated with much of what I was learning. It's been so long now
that I don't remember the exact details, but one of the various people who
I'd met through entirely different channels on the Internet told me about
the Politics list. He wasn't subscribed to it, but he thought it might
interest me, and pointed me in the right direction. I signed up, and I've
been there every since. In fact, I am now a Supreme Court Justice.
Adam: You are not. You're lying.
Bill: Am too! Within the context of the Politics list, anyway. There are
three Supreme Court Justices, and I'm one of them.
Adam: Okay, say I wanted a cabinet position. How would I find the Politics list?
Bill: Well, I can't be sure you'd be offered one, but let's say you are
interested in Politics anyway, and you decide to look around for it. If
you don't know where to look — or even what you're looking for — how can
you hope to find it in the vast sea of Internet resources?
Well fortunately, the LISTSERV programs that run many of the mailing lists
themselves are pretty helpful. They maintain a complete list of lists,
called (not surprisingly) LISTSERV Lists. You can retrieve this list fairly
easily from any LISTSERV, such as listserv@ricevm1.rice.edu, by sending
email to it with the words "LIST GLOBAL" in the body of your message.
Adam: If you don't want to keep your own copy of the list of mailing lists, but do want to
be able to get at it when you need it, you can find it in numerous places online. Beware
that it's a lot of data, so the files are large and sometimes unwieldy. One place that I like
to look for this sort of thing is in the newsgroup, news . lists, which contains periodically
updated lists of lots of useful information, along with some utter trivia such as the most
prolific Usenet poster of the month (see figure 5.5).
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 65
neujsJists
Changes to List of Rctioe Neu>sgroups, Part I
Changes to List of Active Newsgroups^ Part II
Changes to Mailing Lists Available in Usenet
Changes to Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part i
Changes to Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part II
Changes to How to Construct the Mai I paths File
Changes to List of Moderators for Usenet
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Port 4/6
List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part 1/7
List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part 2/7
List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part 6/7
List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part 7/7
Changes to List of Periodic informational Postings
List of Periodic informational Postings, Part 3/7
List of Periodic informational Postings, Part 4/7
List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part 5/7
Known Geographic Distributions
Public Organizational & Logical Network Distr ibut ions
News Administration Macros for Geographic Distr ibutions
Known University Distributions
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 1/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 2/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 3/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 4/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 5/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 6/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 7/8
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part 8/8
Sites honoring invalid newsgroups (by site)
Sites honoring invalid newsgroups (by group)
Articles rejected at news.uu.net during the post week
Top 25 News Submitters by User by Kbytes for the last 2 weeks
Top 25 News Submitters by User by number of articles for the last 2 weeks
Top 25 News Submitters by Site by Kbytes for the last 2 weeks
Top 25 News Submitters by Site by number of articles for the last 2 weeks
Top 25 News Groups for the last 2 weeks
Totol traffic through uunet for the last 2 weeks
Figure 5.5 Lists, lists, lists; we've got lists.
Adam: As you can see, there are a number of postings for the 'Tublicly Accessible Mail-
ing Lists." That's because the entire list is too large to put in a single message. Just down-
load all of the messages if you want to keep your own copy for searching, but remember
that the details change frequently. I also like searching the entire list of groups via the
Web, at this site:
http : / /alpha . acast . nova . edu /listserv . html
Lurking
Adam: The next trick, once you've found a group that interests you, is learning how to
assimilate without seriously offending your new-found acquaintances. The first thing
most people do, or at least should do, is lurk. Don't worry, we're not suggesting that you
spend your spare time in dark alleyways, frightening passersby. On the Internet, lurking
is an innocuous occupation practiced by the vast majority of Internet users. It simply
means that you read and observe the goings-on without actually contributing to the
group. Think of the old adage about how children should be seen and not heard. On the
Internet, no one even sees the lurkers, and there's nothing to hear from a lurker, either.
Parti
66 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Bill: Let's take a newsgroup on which I lurk as an example. The group
comp.sys.powerpc is devoted to discussion of the PowerPC machines from
IBM and Apple. People talk about everything from the number of transis-
tors on the chip to the speeds we can expect from it in the next year to
the reasons it may or may not wipe the floor with its Intel competition.
Much of this information and conversation is extremely technical, far
more technical than I am. I can understand much of it, but I sure don't
know enough to contribute intelligently to the conversation. So I just
sit there and read and soak it in— the possibilities offered by these new
machines interest me, but I don't know enough about them to post con-
structively.
Adam: I do much the same thing that Bill does, with a list called Newton-L that comes
from listserv@dartmouth.edu. 1 think some of the Newton technology represents the
future of computing in terms of intelligent assistance, so 1 like to stay up to date on what
people say about the MessagePad.
Introducing Yourself
Adam: Once you do decide to participate in the discussions (and we strongly recommend
that you do so when you feel you have something useful to add), be careful at first, since
people are often judged on first impressions on the Internet. If you act as though you're
Zeus' gift to the nets, people will quite correctly consider you to be a serious jerk. I
suppose that if "serious jerk" describes you well, you might want to stick with that tone in
your posts, but if you want anyone to listen to you and respond in a thoughtful and
intelligent manner, you should pick up a little humility at the 7-Eleven.
Bill: And some beef jerky while you're at it.
Adam: Bill, you're a vegetarian.
Bill: I'm not positive that beef jerky contains animal products.
Adam: Good point — do vegetarians eat petrochemicals? In general, discussion lists are
little worlds all to themselves, so what you've done or said in one group generally won't
be known in another. This can be both good and bad — if you were a major contributor to
one group and move to another, your reputation probably will neither precede, nor
follow you. You must prove yourself all over again, although Td hope that you would
know how to go about it more quickly the second time. However, if you managed to
become known as a major drip on one list, you can move to another and enjoy a clean
slate.
One of the Gang
Adam: We've talked about the processes of finding the group of people with whom you
want to hang out, how not to offend them immediately — by lurking and watching what
goes on, and some basics about introducing yourself to the list. But what about the
majority of the time you spend on the list? How do you assimilate into the day-to-day
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 67
conversations that ebb and flow across the wires? How do you become one of the gang,
and how do you ascend to a chair on the front porch from which you can sit and spit
while trading tall tales? Hopefully, it's mostly a matter of being your normal friendly self,
but here are a few other things to consider.
Bill: The means of becoming accepted in your group varies quite a bit. I
believe my acceptance into a social group called the Pink Iguana Tavern
began the day I started a pie fight. It began simply enough— I chose a
safe target, the woman who had introduced me to the group in the first
place. I knew that planting a virtual pie in her face wouldn't upset her
greatly, so she was my target. Of course, she had other friends present
on Relay (the precursor to Internet Relay Chat, the interactive chatting
part of the Internet) that night, and one of them, Frank, I think, sprang
to her defense by informing me that I had just received a banana cream
pie pressed firmly against my face. Somebody else who had probably been
just looking for an excuse to get Frank leapt to my defense, and soon the
proprietor had wheeled in the virtual dessert cart. The rest is history.
Adam: Sounds virtually messy.
Bill: Yes, but virtually tasty too. Of course, not every group will ac-
cept you on the basis of your written slapstick skills.
Adam: Since many of the discussion lists and Internet groups exchange useful — at least to
the participants — information, making yourself useful always speeds the assimilation
process. The more I learn about the business world, the more I realize it's not so much
what you know, it's who you know. On the Internet, however, that doesn't fly. No one
gives a hoot who you know, but if your knowledge is valuable to the members of the
group, they appreciate it.
Bill: It is usually best to let others decide v/hether your knowledge is
valuable to the members of the group, rather than deciding yourself, if
you truly want to get along with them.
Adam: You must still dole out your knowledge with the online equivalent of a smile,
since no one likes a know-it-all in the real world or on the Internet, even if you do. Know
it all, that is.
I've tried to practice what I'm preaching here on the main groups in which I participate
currently, the Info-Mac Digest and the comp . sy s . mac . comm newsgroup. The Info-Mac
Digest carries general Macintosh discussions, and since I know that there are plenty of
knowledgeable and helpful folks on the list, I don't attempt to answer every question to
which I happen to know the answer. However, if a question comes up in one of my fields
of expertise, such as MacTCP connections to the Internet, Nisus (the word processor I
use), recent events in the industry, or certain PowerBook issues, I try to jump in and help
out. Much of the research I do for articles in TidBITS aids me in this process, so even if I
decide not to write an article about something, I often share the knowledge I picked up on
Info-Mac. As I see it, if I know an answer that no one else on the group is likely to know,
it's my duty to my friends to pass on that bit of information.
Parti
68 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Signal-to-Noise
Adam: One of the reasons for the proliferation of Usenet newsgroups is that they tend to
split into much smaller groups to bring the signal-to-noise ratio back into line.
Bill: Whack! Two minute penalty for jargon.
Adam: Humph. Let me explain, will you? Signal-to-noise is a phrase that probably comes
from a field like electrical engineering or something, but it's quite simple with regard to
information on the Internet. Signal is information that interests you, and noise is informa-
tion that you would prefer never darkened your monitor. The concept applies well to
many fields — for instance, in terms of music, for me, Leonard Cohen is signal, whereas
Kate Bush is noise.
Bill; Hey!
Adam: Knew that would get a rise out of you. Note that I didn't say that signal was
information that was generally interesting, since it's not. Signal is information that
interests you, and possibly no one else. What interests Bill may bore me stiff, and vice
versa. That's why we participate in different groups on the Internet. But, in fact, any
group talks about a large number of different topics, and as an individual, you may find
yourself utterly uninterested in most of them. That's fine — there's no one checking up on
you to see if you read all the messages in a group.
Of course, if you have a technical bent, you'll consider any socializing to be noise, since it
doesn't convey useful information for you. And, for the socialites (or is it socialists?), the
socializing might be all you want from life.
Bill; The concept of signal-to-noise doesn't apply everywhere, of course.
You need a focus of some kind in order for noise to interfere with it.
The Pink Iguana Tavern, for instance, was entirely a social group— every-
thing we talked about could be considered signal. Or noise, if you pre-
fer. But nothing was outside the intended topic of discussion, since
there wasn't one.
Interactive Internet
Adam: OK, here comes a fun section.
Bill; Yes, this one should really irritate our production folks. That's
great fun. "Wow," I'll say, "how can we ever make something like this
look good?" "Don't worry about it," Adam will respond. "That's why Hayden
has production people!" Then we attempt to laugh in a sinister manner,
like the late Mr. Vincent Price would.
Adam: Most people communicate on the Internet through email or Usenet postings. These
are roughly analogous to letters and telegrams — the sender sends when she's ready, and
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 69
the recipient collects the mail when he's ready. Eventually, the process reverses and then
repeats itself, and thus is a conversation born.
Bill: If you're better about writing your mail than I am, anyway. But
there are other ways to communicate and interact on the Internet that
involve live, real-time conversations. This is analogous to the telephone
or, to be more specific, the party line. You actual carry on your conver-
sations with people as you sit at your terminal, typing what you want to
send as you read what other people are saying to you. If it sounds con-
fusing, just wait a few paragraphs and all should become clear.
Adam: First, we plan to visit an area — called a "channel" — on IRC, which stands for
Internet Relay Chat. We're not going to settle for attempting to tell you about IRC; we'll let
the people who hang out there tell you themselves.
Bill: And then we'll pay a quick visit to FurryMUCK, an example of a
multi-user role-playing environment v/here everyone pretends to be anthro-
pomorphized animals. Except me, of course. I'm a six-foot tall anthropo-
morphic pickle.
Adam: Sigh, leave it to me to find the one guy who can't even act weird in synch with
everj^one else.
Bill: Damn straight.
Adam: Bear in mind that we've edited very heavily. There was far too much material to
include here; we've only taken excerpts, and even those were edited for content and
appearance.
Bill: But in some sense, our editing better retains the proper flavor of
the discussions than the original transcripts do. After you've spent some
time on IRC or on a MUD, your brain filters out much of the extraneous
garbage that we've filtered for you here, and starts putting together
fragments of conversation into a coherent whole.
Adam: Let's get started with our first stop on IRC, the #superguy channel.
IRC — #superguy
Bill: I suppose that in this section, since I actually know everyone who
participates, I should provide a cheat sheet, so our readers know which
person matches to which nickname.
Adam: Yeah, I could have used that to begin with.
Bill: Okay, Rubicon is Eric Burns, Superuser is Bill Paul (commonly known
as the Man with Two First Names), and the_Swede is Gary Olson. You'll see
us refer to each other by all these names and by others in this conversa-
tion.
Part I
70 Interitet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Adam: Keep in mind, folks, that Bill knows these people pretty well. As a result, a lot of
the silliness is the product of years of practice.
Bill: And beer.
Adam: I guess. First, let's take a picture so you can see what's happening.
*** Server: AdamEngst has joined channel #superguy
*** Server: BillDcksn has joined channel #superguy
<BillDcksn> All right, everybody, Adam's going to switch into
greyscale and take a snapshot.
Smile for the snapshot...
<AdamEngst>
<the_Swede>
<Superuser>
<the_Swede>
<Rubicon>
<the_Swede>
<Superuser>
heh. . .
Won't that hurt?
my, i feel so. . . grey. . .
Cheese ! 1 ! 1 ! ! 1 1 ! 1 <Bill ' s , that is>
beeeer !
Prozac! I !
Bill: In the ensuing pandemonium, we did manage to take a snapshot. No-
tice the nice interface in Homer, and the fact that you can even see
pictures for some of us (see figure 5.6).
■mOatni vra(H«n»vu»*ip1VA«1igon«Q#fi|wfd#HIVw -
Rubicon CIT CORNtLL £PU
Sufiorutor v^l^tkyrtot dUKjp.oocois ml
<h*-Swodt SVEDE9DRYCASnUDCC£Mja>U
I 3; tuperflUH; Raad Superguy on lltt«Bri>^ucf I um.cc.ucf.edu
Aelicn: Rubicon hatn I ouor hoard th« 'Crooilng ih« Rubicon
amOcksn* Sag cb«M«l
UM..£o«d*> hah .
Sail# for lha scraanshol.
:BlllOCksn> Iti-oh I can't baliaK/a I just said that ..
Retion: Rubicon JoM Raoliw >
;S«d>arus«r> Uon't that hurf>
>tha-S«ada> ag, i faal so. grag. .
iRublcon> ChaMaMMinm <Bill'a, that is*
:Suparusar> Mait, ng hair. . . I
:lha..S»ada> baaaari
OK, aftar a briaf trip to Kansas, wa'ra bock In Oz ogoln.
<Suparusar> Prozoc 1 1 1
'** Ret Ion tha_S«iada loans SUparusar his hoir
<BI I IDcksn> Prozac*>
(BillOcksn> Uosn't noton going to ba hara? That ooral
:Su 9 arvisar> And just ohot aara gou doing alth ag hoir in tha first ploca?
Uait I don't aont to knoo
Sucarvoar> I a chacking for Chris noa..
<R<Aicon> Uail, you knoo Prozoc con ba go^ fnand Con aa talk obeut
mtchall, noa?
Ret ion: thaJSaada bats ha got tha tiaa zona dlfYaranca «rong or
lathing. .
:chal I '
thaJ5aoda> altchal
cBI I IDcksn> Balch.
<Buparusar> I thought Ml tchal I aas dastrogad. .
<8uparusar> Hn: Chris Isn't loggad In.
<RUbicon> In about taantg alnutas, this aog dlo. If It doasn. I'll log bock
on Via ag oon account
tha-Saada> aitchall anists althin oil of vs.
I'd ask aho Ititctiall is, but It egipaars to ba o long storg
Rs alth avarything In Svpargug
I theuidit thot aos cholastarol
0: f onsiile
3d
Figure 5.6 Superguy authors; yes, they are really that weird.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 71
<AdamEngst>
<Superuser>
*** Action:
<Superuser>
<Rubicon>
<Superuser>
<BillDcksn>
<AdamEngst>
<the_Swede>
<Superuser>
<Rubicon>
<the Swede>
<Superuser>
<the_Swede>
<Superuser>
<BillDcksn>
<Superuser>
<Rubicon>
<Superuser>
<Rubicon>
OK, after a brief trip to Kansas, we're back in Oz
again.
Wait, my hair. . . I
the_Swede loans Superuser his hair...
And just what were you doing with my hair in the first
place? Wait... I don't v/ant to know...
Well, you know — Prozac can be your friend.
I thought that was cholesterol.
So didn't we have some interview questions or something?
OK, first question - perhaps stupid. Do you get anything
“productive" done on IRC? Or is email more useful?
Obviously it depends on your definition of productive.
what... this isn't productive?
Well, we collaborate a lot on Superguy writing, and it's
easier to discuss things live than via mail. ? Expionngthe
^ Internet
Productive... well, as a co-writer of Superguy, I'd have ^
to say yes. It's a place where I can contact other of my
Superguy authors and discuss upcoming events and the
like.
the only time i recall ever doing something productive
here is while the bills and i were working on a
storyline back in december...
In case you haven't guessed, we don't use IRC for work
purposes.
i don't have net access at work, as they expect me to do
actual work or something...
The fiends.
Well, unless we can turn Superguy into a meal ticket...
I just had a meal, thank you...
Well — I can list some 'practical' applications.
Go ahead: I dare you.
In my guise as a mild-mannered English Lit type person,
I have had actual scholarly discourse on here — and
therefore I have found productive use of IRC. Nah nah
nah
Bill: Eric's comment touched off a massive dose of silliness that has
been edited out for brevity. However, you can find much more of its kind
in Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh , where this very conversation is
reproduced in all of its glory.
72 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Adam: Well, most of its glory, anyway. We next tried to get back onto an interview
question...
<BillDcksn>
Okay, guys, this is for Adam's benefit. And don't try
to lie, because I know the answer:
<the_Swede>
awww. . . telling the truth's no fun...
<Superuser>
No, you can't borrow any money.
<Rubicon>
So what's the next question, o Writer-types? :)
<BillDcksn>
Would you say your electronic persona, in an environ-
ment like IRC, is different from your real-life per-
sona?
<Superuser>
What real-life persona...
<BillDcksn>
Oooooo, good answer :)
<Superuser>
Hell", I barely have a real-life, let alone a per-
sona. . .
Adam; Is Hell trademarked?
Bill: In the Superguy universe, Hell" is actually a corporation, and yes,
the name is trademarked. The main offices are in Fong's Enchilada Empo-
rium, a Mexican restaurant staffed by the souls of the damned.
Adam: Why is it that every time I ask you a question about Superguy, I wish I hadn't?
<the_Swede>
<Rubicon>
<Superuser>
<the_Swede>
<Rubicon>
<Superuser>
<BillDcksn>
<the_Swede>
<Rubicon>
<BillDcksn>
in IRC? not really... i'm not on often enough for
that... on the muck, yes...
Ooo... tough question...
Dowh!
okey dokey. . . : )
I would say my electronic persona is very like my real
persona — my friends who I have met online and then
met in life say I'm a lot like who I say I am on the
net : )
Except that in real-life, Eric looks like a hot -dog
vendor. :)
Two points 1
or, without his beard, like one of the super mario
brothers. . .
Hey, Bill — they know what I look like. I'm on their
screen, remember?
Adopts an interviewer persona. "So then, would you say
that people sign onto IRC to insult each other?"
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 73
<Superuser> %'&'#&*(%* (O'* 1
<the_Swede> *'(&*'%%$#%&* (%*&%'&'$&#' !
<AdainEngst> Seems the answer is yes.
<the_Swede> umm... well, actually, not really...
<Superuser> Hmm... you are going to edit all this before putting it
into the book, yes?
<AdamEngst> Maybe. They're going to like the insulting parts of the
book. Bill.
<Superuser> I thought we were the insulting parts of the book.
<the_Swede> hey, readers! your mothers dress you funny!
Adam: Hmm, on that note, let's move on to another form of live inter-personal interaction
on the Internet.
MUCKing with the Furries
Bill: Adam and I are now going to enter a different sort of interactive
setting, known as a MU*.
Adam: A what?
Bill: A MU*. The asterisk is a wildcard, allowing the term to stand for
MUD, MUCK, MUSH, or whatever the latest variety is. MUDs were the first
of this set of programs, and the term stands for Multi-User Dungeon or
Multi-User Dimension, depending on who you're talking to and perhaps on
the MUD in question.
Adam: This sounds like a different type of IRC. Similar idea, correct?
Bill: Well, on a basic level, yes. It's a program that enables numerous
people on the Internet all to interact with each other in real time. But
MUDs and their ilk open up a whole new realm of possibilities.
Adam: Tve heard that MUDs are an environment of sorts, in which you can move about
and role-play, much like a game.
Bill: Yes, but in many of them the role-playing is much more like theatre
than like a game of Acuras & Attorneys.
Adam: Is that a real game?
Bill: Good lord, no.
Adam: Phew!
Bill: A MUD has another important feature— it is user-modifiable. If you
join a MUD and create a character, and the owners of the MUD permit it,
you can build your own home and describe it. Other characters (and, by
Parti
74 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
proxy, their players) can then visit and explore your home, experiencing
it as you have defined it. There is a very real sense of space on a MUD.
Adam: That's difficult to wrap the mind around. What do you mean by the character's
home? The character is just an artificial construct, right?
Bill: Not if you're a good enough actor. But I realize this can be con-
fusing to talk about, so I'm not going to try to explain it further. It
would be far better simply to show you.
We'll visit a MUCK known as FurryMUCK. The concept is a bit interesting:
the characters are all anthropomorphized animals, creatures known as
"furries. "
Adam: Oh, great... you're going to introduce me to something I don't understand, using
as an example, something else I don't understand.
Bill: Yup! Brace yourself... we're going to jump right into an interesting
bit of the conversation we had while we were visiting, in which our hosts
discussed the differences they see between MUDs and IRC.
/ ' ')))•)//)■)/
Ill /-<
(_/ (_/_/ (_/ (_/ u I ■ (_ (_/ (—1 I )
/
I
AdamEngst says, "We've just spent some time on IRC - how do you
think the socializing here is different? Do you
use IRC at all?"
Mer'rark walks in from Sable Street.
Mer'rark says, "Slice was telling me there's some guys writing a
book about this place?"
FoxTrot yaps, "Here it is a little different then IRC because
people have characters they use to express
themselves. "
Triggur whickers, "This environment is much richer than IRC. Less
artificial. "
ErmaFelna says, "There's more of a sense of *place* here... you
can move around, have a distinct concept of
rooms and objects... this is much more of a game
as well. "
Dekhyr says, "Never been on IRC. Or any 'social MUD' for that
matter, except this one. And this one only two
weeks ago. Used to play hack-n-slash MUDs. Got
bored of it. Socializing this way for some
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 75
reason seems to be better than the pot-luck I
tend to get in RL. "
FoxTrot yaps, "Also, IRC is highly topic oriented, here, you can
go somewhere and the topic will change a lot.'
Kimiko nods at FoxTrot.
ErmaFelna says, "This place is much more flexible than IRC; it's
a lot easier for the players to modify the
general environment. Anyone can add new commands
for people to use, or reprogram portions of the
setup. I've written programs to do anything from
making a lock that only lets the people inside
choose who can come in, to creating an object
that can be used as a container."
Dekhyr says, "Probably the thing I like about Furry most of all
is that you *need* a kind of extroverted imagi-
nation to even play a furry in the first place."
Adam: As it happens, we visited FurryMUCK very shortly after a rather unflattering
description of the place appeared in Wired magazine. Our hosts took the opportunity,
while talking to us, to rebut the article, fairly convincingly. A little bit of that conversation:
AdamEngst says, "What do furries generally think about the out-
side view of MUDS and this MUCK in specific? Is
that view unrealistic or off-base?"
Triggur whickers, "Uhhhh... 'too kyoot' is a common reaction :)
lots of outsiders think this place is too sticky
sweet, especially from a MUD standpoint."
FoxTrot yaps, "They are quite often biased towards one activity,
as WIRED illustrates."
Dekhyr says, "I think everyone latches on to the erotic sector of
MUCK. Too emotionally charged."
Dekhyr says, "Some people couldn't imagine playing a MUD. They
feel it's a waste of time."
Lynx purrs, "Dunno, you tell me, what's the outside view of MUDs
and MUCKS?"
AdamEngst says, "Well, the addictive nature of MUDs is certainly
mentioned a lot."
Kimiko nods, they ARE addictive... worlds can be created here...
Lynx nods. This is true. Stay away, AdamEngst, you'll find your
free time slipping away...
ErmaFelna says, "This particular MUCK has a very general theme,
which means that things tend to be extremely
free-form. What big events do happen tend to be
Parti
76 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
very fast versions of co-operative story-tell-
ing, with a lot of the same difficulties: one
person can Deus Ex Machina the plotline and ruin
it for everyone else."
Pickle declares, "Erma, is there a set of rules to guide things
like that?"
ErmaFelna says, "Rules? Not really... just politesse and some
general guidelines."
Triggur whickers, "thank GOD there's no rules :)"
Kratsminsch says, “I've also used the MUCK to contact experts in
certain fields, when I got lost trying to fix
something RL."
Kimiko does that tool (have a computer Q? ©shout for an answer!)
Bill: And lastly, in one of my favorite moments, we got to see
that old-timers like to berate the newcomers on MUDs, just like
in real life:
Pickle declares, “How long has Furry been around?"
ErmaFelna says, "It's been around a little over three years, now.
Of course, some of us have been MUDding since
before Furry existed." She nods over to Lynx.
Lynx mumbles something about how when HE was a kit, we had to
telnet 12 miles uphill through thick snow and
line noise to get to a MUD, and then we
telnetted 12 miles back the other way, also
uphill, to get a response back, and we LYKED yt.
Bill: And on that note, I think it's time to move on.
Browsing the Second-Hand Bookstore
of the Internet
Adam: The Internet is many things to many people, but when we were trying to think
about how to express the range of information available on the Internet, all we could
think of was a second-hand bookstore.
Bill: That's because in a second-hand bookstore, you’re likely to wander
around, gazing aimlessly at the books until something catches your eye,
at which point you'll pick it up and browse through it.
Adam: And even if you're looking for something about cooking, say, you don't go to a
second-hand bookstore with a specific idea of what you want to buy. You go thinking.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 77
'"Maybe I'll buy a cookbook today." If you want Julia Child's The Way to Cook specifically,
you'll go to a fancy new bookstore,
Bill: We're going to wander aimlessly on the Internet for a while, seeing
what we may see.
Adam: And then we'll look for some general categories of information, just so you can see
approximately the sorts of things that are out there. Once again, don't worry about the
technical details of what we do here. Just file them away in the back of your mind, and
once you've played with some of the Macintosh programs yourself, perhaps read this
section again to get a feel for how people actually use the Internet.
Aimless Wandering
Bill: Some days you get up and realize you want to do something, but
you're not at all certain exactly what. I do, anyway. This is the sort of
day that often leads me into one of the more active parts of town, window
shopping and hanging out in bookstores, thumbing through anything that S? Exploring the
catches my eye, or in music stores, flipping through all the compact ^ internet
discs from A to Z.
While I'm looking around, I often find one or two items of interest that
I want to take home with me. I find many other things that have an inter-
esting cover or a nice store display, but which completely fail to live
up to the initial intrigue. But I never feel I've wasted my time, because
of the unexpected finds.
We're now going to take a semi-random drive through some of the informa-
tion that you can find on the Internet. At first, we're going to use a
program called Mosaic that simplifies browsing on the World Wide Web.
Adam: Let me explain a little bit about this World Wide Web that we're traveling on
before I go much further. The World Wide Web is made up of many documents that
include text, graphics, sounds, and even movies, but most importantly, these documents
contain links to other documents scattered around the world. As I write this, there is no
way to see a list of everything that exists on the Web.
Not only can you not see a list of all the documents on the Web, you can't even see a list of
all the machines that are part of the Web. Because of this fact, numerous sites have created
sets of links that collect and categorize various different types of information. You might
think of these sites as live encyclopedias — as new resources appear, the people who run
these encyclopedia sites check out the new resources and add them to the encyclopedia.
There are two basic groupings that I've seen in encyclopedic sites — chronological and
topical. The NCSA What's New page is an example of a chronological listing — the only
way you can find resources in it is to browse through them. And, if the resource you're
looking for appeared before the current month, you have to switch to a different What's
New page for the month in which that resource appeared. It's great for browsing and
lousy for searching.
78 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Bill: We're going to take a quick spin around the Web now, with Adam
driving. Let's see if he can take us somewhere fun, shall we?
Adam: I'm starting my trip at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications,
mostly because that's where their NCSA Mosaic program takes you first, by default.
Bill: Just to clarify— Mosaic is what we call a client program. The World
Wide Web isn't a program, per se, though there are programs that make it
perform different functions. These are called server programs^ and their
job is to offer up the Web's information using standard procedures. A
client program familiar with these procedures is required in order for
you, the user, to obtain and make use of the information.
Remember the description used earlier? You might think of the server
software as being a dessert cart; you're not allowed to put your filthy
paws on the pastries, so you need a client, a set of tongs, perhaps, to
obtain that tasty eclair. Mosaic is our set of tongs. There are other
tongs now available, such as MacWeb and Netscape Navigator.
Adam: Nice simile. Bill, but now I'm getting hungry. All right. I'm going to act on whim
now and use a link on the NCSA Home Page to go back in time and look at the old What's
New page from November. I remember some good stuff from back then.
Hmm, here's something that sounds interesting. What do you suppose the Fractal Micro-
scope is. Bill?
Bill: No idea. How would they get a fractal onto the slide? Do you need a
cover slip? If you cut a fractal in half, will both halves regenerate?
Adam: Ahem. It seems to be in some way related to a program, written by NCSA for
schools, with which students can explore fractals, and thus, the art and science of math-
ematics. I think it runs on a supercomputer, which means that it's really fast. But for the
life of me, I can't find anything that lets us play with it. That's why I wasn't a biology
major at Cornell — they wouldn't let me play with the electron microscope freshman year.
And now I appear to be too old to play with the Fractal Microscope.
Bill: Salescritters often use fractal programs to show off the graphics
capabilities of a computer. There must be some out there for the Mac-
want to find one?
Adam: Sure — we'll use WAIS for this one. I'm going to search through all of the Info-Mac
Bill: Pretty cool. Can we actually see any of these images on the
Internet?
Adam: It appears so — at the Fractal Microscope server I see a link to a gallery of fractal
images located in France. Going there we first see a link to the image of the guy who
maintains this server. The server also claims to have animations as well as static images,
but let's stick with the pictures, since animations are often quite large and will take a long
time to download so we can view them (see figure 5.8).
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 79
Look for documents about
fractals m4nd»1brot|
o
o
(
Run )
Which are similar to In these sources
•LT
< 9 > macintosh-news.src
7y
Results
IS documents
© M I K Info-Mac Digest VI 0 »1 65 : [*1 Fractals AfterDark Module
[?1 1 K Info-Mac Digest VI 0 * 1 20 : 1*1 Fractals After Dark Module
© ra IK Info-Mac Digest VII *104: [*] MandelZot 4.0 [part 1 of 9)
^ 753 Info-Mac Digest VIO “196: [*1 FractalStartup
^ 1 K Info-Mac Digest V8 “1 98 : Wanted ; Mandelzot 3.0 save files
(?) [^ 2K Info-Mac Digest V9 “21 7 : [*1 MandelZot 3.0.4
(g) IK Info-Mac Digest Vll “153: [*] mandel-music-hc.hqx
M IK Info-Mac Digest VIO “156: [*] posting Date: Tue, 30 Jun 9
^ IK Info-Mac Digest VIO “221 : [*1 rectri qtm
S 3K Info-Mac Digest V8 “190 : [*1 MandelZot 3.0
IK Info-MacDigest VII “172: [♦Imandelbrot-arta-IO.hqx
gj ^ 2K Info-Mac Digest V8 “116: New Fractal Design Software
(?) ^ 859 Info-Mac Digest V1 1 “73 : (»] Mandelbrot startup screen
document type: TEXT from : macintosh-news.src
m
Figure 5.7 Plenty of them out there.
fi? Exploring the
^ Internet
Mandelbrot pictures (01-10)
I ^ I Mandebrot pictures ( Search ] [keg word ]
URL: jhttp ://www.cnam.fr/fractals/mandell htmt
Mandelbrot pictures (01-10)
Figure 5.8 The tenth image removed for symmetry's sake.
80 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Adam: Time to switch back to the What's New page and browse some more. Here's
something for the online activists to get their teeth into — a server called INFACT Online.
Bill: What's that stand for?
Adam: I don't know — they don't seem to say. It appears to have something to do with an
anti-tobacco campaign. Let's go there and read more about it. Yes, it is indeed true
Internet activism, and their specific mission is to store information relating to the cam-
paign to force tobacco companies to stop marketing cigarettes to children (see figure 5.9).
INFflCT's Tobacco Industry Compoign
I INFACT’S Tobacco ▼] [ S**roh | [^word
URL: |http://5<v<.c5hl.orq/’’’bout»11/if>f»c<.htnr>T~
htip ;/ /sW » .cshl.org /It ti*rs.html
INFACTs Tobacco Industry Campaign
Welcome to the online edition of the INFACT tobacco industry
campaign! The complete set of documents (including graphics)
is now available. New information will appear regularly, so
watch this page for new developments!
lai E
Hi
Figure 5.9 Smoke, Look cool, smell bad.
Poking around some more on this server turns up an open letter to the Internet so you can
learn more about what they're trying to do and why. Also located here are some form
letters that you can download, fill in, and mail to the chief executive officers of various
tobacco companies. I like the logos (see figure 5.10).
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 81
Exploring the
^ Internet
Figure 5.10 Say it ain't so, ]oe.
Bill: This server seems to be quite a bit better-organized than most. Who
set this thing up?
Adam: Judging from the home page, it's maintained by a man named Tom Boutell. He's
even provided a link to his own home page.
Bill: Let's go there. I'm jealous — I ' ve always wanted my own home page.
Adam: It includes a picture of him and even a sound that says "I live in Seattle. I
telecommute to New York. It's a hell of a drive."
Bill: Hey, another Seattlelite. Where does he live?
Adam: Wait a minute — here's a pointer called "Where I live." Clicking on that takes us to,
hmm, looks like a site run by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), home of many
Very Smart Folks who have come up with ideas like the graphical interface for computers,
which has evolved into the Macintosh and Windows interfaces.
The Xerox PARC site shows a map of the Northwest with Seattle roughly in the center,
but it's not particularly detailed (see figure 5.11).
82
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
(
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Map Viewer: world 47.39N 120.67W (49.0X)
Select another point on the map to reposition, or select an option below. Please read
OptioRt:
• Zoom In; ,(2l ilL .OfiL Zoom Out: ,(J^l .(JilfiL .<JZ25).
• Features: Default . All : -borders , - rivers
• Displag: monochrome : Projection: elliptical, rectangular . sinusoidal : Narrow . Square
• Change Database to
Figure 5.11 Our little corner of the world.
There seem to be various different controls for zooming in — Awk! The host machine at
Xerox just went down. Blast it, just as it was getting interesting. Humph, we'll have to
come back later when the machine is back up. That sort of thing happens on the Internet,
and you never know whose fault it is. Thus, it's best to just assume that not everything is
perfect and avoid stressing out over machines that you can't connect to.
Bill: Such is life.
Adam: Let's try another link from the What's New Page. I've always been a sucker for
dinosaur exhibits in museums, so let's take a peek at the University of California at
Berkeley Paleontology Exhibit — I've heard other people say that it's well done.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 83
It has a nice entry page that I can't show you because the picture was too large to fit into a
reasonable figure. Those of you who can, just go there yourself and browse around.
Instead, let's check out the About page (see figure 5.12).
About tho
Musoum
Rbout This Seruer m
Oj I I About This Server ^ [ S»trch j|l<»gvord
URL; ihttp://ucmp1 »du/htb<n/ima9»fnap/huff?87,490
Map: http://ucmp1 l>«rk*1*g.*du/im«9«s/ve1com*s*rvtr.gif
Aboi4t ttiis
Sorvor
Onlino
Catalogs
Subway to
Othor Sorvors
Exhibits
^
About This Server
The purpose of this server is to explore the possibilities of an interactive natural history
museum through the Internet. Although we cannot possibly emulate the feel of a real life
museum, we hope that this adventure can be just as fun and interactive. Because our
medium is so flexible and easily changed, we are very responsive to people's ideas and
thoughts about our server. If you have a good idea, lets us know, because this exhibit
belongs to the Internet as a whole.
{u Exploring the
^ Internet
Figure 5.12 They have the best icons of anything Tve seen yet.
Adam: In this case, they have all sorts of statistics about how many people have stopped
in for a look around. In January 1994, the UC Berkeley Paleontology exhibit served
1,242,427,149 bytes of information contained in 98,401 files. That's over 1.2 gigabytes of
information, and when you average it out, it comes to 3,514 files of 44,372,398 bytes (44M)
per day.
Bill: That's a lot of information to send around the world on the
Internet.
Adam: And it's growing all the time. In the first nine days of February 1994, the site
averaged over 62 megabytes of data each day. I've heard statistics that say the traffic on
the World Wide Web increases at over 300 percent per month. We're probably boring our
nice readers with all these numbers, so let's go check out the exhibits (see figure 5.13).
84
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 5.13 WJiere to start, that's ahvays the problem.
Bill: Ooo, good stuff.
Adam: I see that I can quite easily spend the rest of my afternoon here, browsing through
the exhibits, and all without hurting my feet. So let's stop wandering and see if we can
find something specific.
I Wonder If
Adam: Although the World Wide Web is tine best place for aimless wandering and for
finding information on a given topic, there are other tools. In order to find out what
information is available on some general topic, I sometimes turn to WAIS databases and
Gopherspace.
Bill: What about Archie?
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 85
Adam: Archie also is a good tool for answering a nagging curiosity, although Archie's
information generally seems to be less useful to me than what I find via WAIS and
Gopher, mostly because all that Archie finds is files, and then you must transfer them to
your Mac before you can find out whether there's anything useful inside. Anyway, let's
start with penguins.
Bill: Penguins? You're going to use the most powerful information tool in
history to search for flightless waterfowl?
Adam: Smile when you say that. Just to placate you. I'll start with an Archie searcli via
Anarchie. It finds a good number of files (see figure 5.14) with the word "penguin" in the
title, although there are number of duplicates, and most of the rest appear to be graphics
files, including a scan of the cover from Berke Breathed's Penguin Dreams and Stranger
Things.
penguin from orchie.Internic.nel
D p«nguin-dr‘e«ms.jpg
D p«nguin-dre4ms.<xt
D penguin-regisir^tion-numsi^qx
D p»nguin-s»rul-nufnb»rs.hqx
D pw>goin-uti)Uies.hqx
0 penguin
0 penguin .icon
0 penguin.pcx
D penguin.t»r.Z
D penguin. ixt
CD penguin.uss.tek.com
CD penguin.uss.tek.com
D penguin Z
D penguinl.jpg
Q penguin2.jpg
CD penguins
Size Dete Zone Host
Peth
^engui
U penguins msa
D rsp-penguin.tcon.Z
P rsp-pen^in.gif
155k
ik
23k
34k
116k
6k
2k
4k
591k
4k
10/14/93
10/14/93
9/18/91
6/29/91
6/29/91
6/3/92
7/29/88
4/16/92
10/6/93
2/20/93
8/1 1 /93
8/21 /93
1/21/94
7/30/92
7/30/92
4/10/93
5 ftp.sunet se
5 ftp.sunet.se
1 wuerchive.v/ustl.edu
1 vuerchive.wustl.edu
1 vuerchive.wustl.edu
1 sumex-eim stenford.edu
1 emx.cc.utexes.edu
1 hpcsos.ooIhp.com
2 ftp.cpsc.uce1gerg.oe
1 ftp nevede edii
I ftp.uunet
1 ftp.csumn.edu
1 csd4.csd.uvm.edu
seune.cs.hut.fi
seune.os.hut.fi
/pub /pictures /comics /Bloom .Countg /penguin-dreams .Jpg
/pub /pictures /comics /Bloom .County /penguin-dreams .txt
/systems/mec/info-meo/Old/cerd/penguin-registration-numsi^x
/sy stems /mac /info-meo/Old / cerd /penguin-serial-numbers .hqx
/sy stems /mec /info-mec /Old /card /penguln-utllrtles .hqx
/pub /exp /images /penguin .bitmap
/pub /mnt /images /icons /SunView /pengutn icon
/mrrors/hpibO/1v95lx/pcx/penguin.pcx
/pub/blob /paper s /penguin ter 2
/pub/ccsd/ANTARCTICAl /penguin.txt
/published/usenix/feces/penguin uss.tek.com
/pub /doc /published /usenix / faces /penguin .uss .t ek .com
/pub /optimus /Graphics / animals /penguin Z
/pub /store /jpg /Misc /penguin 1 jpg
/pub /store / jpg /Misc /penguin2 .jpg
/pub/misc/1grics/p/penquins
K
: 11/10/92 1 vuerchive.wustl.edu /systems/eteri/umich.edu/Gemes/penguins.msa
4/17/88 5 huon.itd.edeleide .edu.au /pub/sun-icons/rsp'penguin.icon.Z
1 /5/93 1 ee.lb1.qov /poskbitmeps/sun..icons/rsp-4)enguin.qif
ns
ft? Exploring the
^ Internet
Figure 5.14 Penguin files on the Internet.
Bill: What's that one that lives in a "lyrics" folder?
Adam: I suspect it's the lyrics to a song done by a group called The Penguins. Let's
retrieve the file and take a look. Whee — it seems to be the lyrics to "Earth Angel." We'll
spare you.
Bill: Kate Bush it's not.
Adam: Enough of these files, and I'm not sure that I want to delve any further in that
group's lyrics. Next up is a swing through Gopherspace, using TurboGopher and search-
ing via Veronica. Although it often makes a difference how you search for things in
Veronica, in this case I think "penguin" will probably find most everything we could
want. The range of penguin items in Gopherspace is much broader than the range of files
that merely have the word "penguin" in their names (see figure 5.15).
86
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
gg— -= penguin 6 ■ pi
Q Cophtr ©1991-1993 Unlv*r5ity of Minn»soU.
El 93-U -18-16: PENGUIN ROOKERIES
El Pengu i n.decay — s t gh ted^by _ Roches te r_ resea rche r s
El Penguin Island (penguin)
Elllie Penguin on top of the Tellyvision set
QPenguin Managenent (organizattonalUntt)
El penguin 1 Author: George Furiya
E|#014«: penguin EVENTS ARE SEEN AT CORNELL. T
El pengu in. sounds
El Penguin official candidate for Pirate presidency
El Ecology awareness grows after penguin disaster
Efiresler's buys Penguin’s Place chain
E Comedian Gallagher’s penguin ’innocent’
EThe Penguin computing book - Susan Curran and Ray
E^he Penguin dictionary of microprocessors - Anthon
E^he Penguin dictionary of saints - Donald Attwater
EThe Penguin history of Christianity [by] Roland H.
EtHE penguin DOIDNARY of SOCIOLOGY [ 4Mar93, Ikb]
EtHE penguin DICTIDNARY OF ECONOMICS [ 4Mar93, llcb]
E^he Penguin dictionary of troublesome words - Bill
Ea penguin year - written and illustrated by Susan
E^he Penguin dictionary of modem quotations; [comp
E the penguin BOOK OF COMIC AND CURIOUS VERSE [ 4«ar
EtHE penguin book of new ZEALAND VERSE [ 4Mar93, Ik
EThe Penguin book of contemporary verse 1918-60. [
EThe Penguin book of eighteenth-century English ver
EThe Penguin book of Spanish verse. [ 4Mar93, Ikb]
EThe new Penguin guide to London - f.R. Banks. [ 4M
EThe Penguin dictionary of surnames. [ 4Mar93, Ikb]
E Pengu in_D reams . ]pg
Epenguin.jpg
E CHARLENE LINDERMAN: HEADING THE PENGUIN PATROL
E penguin. tar
E penguin-utilities
1
1
l|
I
¥
m
Figure 5.15 Penguins in Gopherspace.
Adam: Look at all those books written for penguins. You never realized that penguins
were such literary birds, did you Bill?
Bill: Those are books from the publishing house called Penguin Books.
Adam: Oh. Are you sure?
Bill: Positive. But what’s that bit about penguin events at Cornell?
Adam: A friend told me about that a while back. It's some thoroughly obscure physics
tiling where the Feynman diagram of it looks vaguely like a penguin.
Bill: Oh, come now. You're making that up.
Adam: No I'm not. Take a look at figure 5.16.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 87
#0140: PENGUIN EUENTS ARE SEEN RT CORNELL. T
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
Public Information prepared by Phillip F. Schewe, AP
Volume 14D, August 13, 1993
PENGUIN EVENTS ARE SEEN AT CORNELL. The B meson,
made in high-energy electron-positron collisions, is a composite
object, made of a b (bottom) quark and one of several types
(flavors) of antiquarks. The B quickly decays, usually by a process
in which the b quark itself decays typically into a c (chami) quark
and a W boson. This decay is both flavor -changing— -the b
becomes a c— -and charge -changing since the charge of the b and
c are -1/3 and +2/3, respectively. The CLEO Collaboration,
working at Cornel Ts CESR electron-positron collider, has now
observed the first flavor -changing, non -charge -changing decays of
the b quark, in this case into an s (strange) quark and a photon.
(Actually, in the lab bare b or c quarks are never observed, but
rather the mesons (such as the B or K*) which contain the
quarks.) The Feynman diagrora for this rare process vaguely
resembles a penguin, whence the name penguin event. These
events, some theorists believe, have a bearing on the issue of CP
(charge conjugation and parity) violation. (R. Ammar et al..
Physical Review Letters, 2 Aug.)
» : » ■ .
Figure 5,16 Penguins infiltrate high-energy physics.
Bill: Say, what have we got out there on movies? I need some information
for my Lambada film festival.
Adam: First, Bill, that's a terrible idea. Second, you should save it for later, when we find
specific things. Third, umm, what's a Lambada?
Bill: True, that's a bit more specific than we want right now. The
Lambada is a type of dance, Brazilian I believe, in which the partners
get extraordinarily close. It makes for terrible movies. How about just
general movie information?
Adam: That, we've got (see figure 5.17).
Bill: Well, I think that's an adequate warm-up. We've browsed and
searched on general topics just to see if they're out there— I think now
it's time we work on something a bit more practical.
Adam: Yes. Lest our readers begin to think that the Internet is useful only to browsing
bookworms with time on their hands, let's see if it can answer some specific questions for
us. Will we be able to find what we're looking for? Will any good information exist? Will
our editor tell us we're blathering too much? Is there any other way I can create some
suspense?
Bill: Only way to find out is to try it. Let's go dig for some answers.
Parti
88 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
mouie reuieuis
Mouie Reuieuis
0 Internet Gopher ©1 991 -1 993 Universitg of Minnesota.
0 Internet Gopher ©1 991 -1 993
C] Movie Reviews
(3 Search Movie Revietis
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U Beauty «and_the_Beast
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l5lfun/Movles/1988/ Tony SEPTEMBER : From: RLBJ
Bfun/Movlesyi988/May/SEPPAN : From: relher^
El fun/Moviesyi988/Jul/SOUVENIR : From: iwrid
ElfuiVMovies/1988/Jul/THE BELLY OF AN ARCHH
IS Fun/Movies/1988/Jul/BIG TOP PEE-tfEE : FroiJ
JSL
C]Body_Parts
D Bur led_ Alive
DChilds.Play.S
dCool_World
CD Daybreak
CD Dead. Ago in
engst
LlDeli cates sen
0 Internet Gopher © 1 99 1 - 1 993 University of Minnesota.
CDFreddys.Dead
CD Free jack
CDGroundhog_Day
CDHard. to_Be_a_God
@This list Is empty (no items in list).
lulnona ryder ~ ^ — rrrtg=
0 Internet Gopher ©1991-1993 University of Minnesota.
El t^un/Moviesyi988/Mar/BEETLETUIEE : From: jfreundiMasysl.UUCP (Jim F
E funyMovles/1989/Jul /GREAT BALLS OF FIREI : From: leeper«mtgzx .ott.
El fun/Movies/1989/Nov/HEATHERS : From: moriortyOtc. Fluke. com (Jeff M
Elfun/Movies/1990/Oec/EOVfARD SCISSORHANDS : From: mausdWorgan.COM (M
[^Fun/Movies/1990/Dec/MERMAIDS : From: frankmftniicrosof t.UUCP (Frank
Elfun/Movies/1992/Mar/THIS IS MY LIFE : From: Fran kmdmicrosoft.com (
El fun/Movies/199Z/Jun/NB3HT ON EARTH : From: leeperdmtgzy.att.com (M
Elt=un/Movies/1992/Nov/RESERV0IR DOGS : From: sbbdpanix.com (The Phan
® Fun/Movles/1992/Nov/BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA : From: leeperdntgzy.att
E Fun/Movles/1993/Sep/THE AGE OF INNOCENCE : From: rinddenterprise.b
■ i- ■ • i
m
Figure 5.17 The electronic Siskel and Ebert.
Looking for Files in All the Wrong Places
Bill: We've separated the things we're going to look for into two groups
that we're going to call "files" and "facts." A file is any given thing
that you want to obtain— a program for your computer, for instance, or a
back issue of an electronic journal that you can obtain over the
Internet, such as InterText or Moose Droppings. You also may find the
lyrics to that song that's been driving you crazy for the past 36 hours,
such as the theme to "Gilligan's Island."
Adam: Whatever you do, folks, don't think about it! Just drive the millionaire and his wife
straight from your mind. Don't let it take hold! Don't think about the theme to "Gilligan's
Island"! Just relax, and sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip...
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 89
Bill: Adam, that was a terrible thing to do! Folks, I apologize. After
we've gone out onto the Internet and located some files, we'll start
looking for facts. A fact is any piece of information that you can locate
on the Internet— the answer to a riddle, help on a specific problem you
may be having, or perhaps a concert date.
Let's get started; maybe we can distract you so you don't think about the
theme to "Gilligan's Island" too much. We're going to be downloading a
few things, so I'll want to make some room. Hold on while I clean up my
desktop a bit here...
Adam: Wait, how did you do that?
Bill: Do what?
Adam: You dragged that icon into your menu. The Mac doesn't normally allow that.
Bill: Oh, that's MenuDropper, by David WinterburnI I couldn't live with-
out it, and as freeware, you can't beat the price.
ft? Exploring the
Adam: Well, let's go get it. This is a case where a direct approach could work well: I know internet
MenuDropper's name, and I know where Macintosh utilities are stored. I could probably
find it relatively quickly by browsing through the directories on sumex-
aim.stanford.edu.
Bill: But you can never get into that site these days. It's become ex-
tremely popular, and tends to be completely filled with as many users as
it can support, all the time. So we're probably going to have to find
another source.
Adam: True, and that's a good use for Archie, since we can ask Anarchie to search for the
file and tell us where it lives. A double-click later and it will be on my hard disk.
Bill: I should note once again that Archie is the name of the program
that runs on the Internet machine, whereas Anarchie (pronounced like
"anarchy," not "an archie") is a Macintosh client that talks to the re-
mote Archie server.
Adam: I'm going to take advantage of a small piece of information I happen to know from
having been around for a while. There are two main sites that archive Macintosh files, and
they have slightly different naming schemes. The Info-Mac folks like putting dashes
between words, whereas the administrators of the site at mac . archive . umich . edu don't
use any separator at all. Since we're searching for a file called MenuDropper, I suspect
that it will be called either "menu-dropper" or "menudropper" so I'll search on both of
those words.
Bill: And the winner is...?
90 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Adam: Anarchie was able to find a number of sites that carry the same file. In this in-
stance, I'm afraid we're going to have be rude and request a file from overseas, since I
know for a fact that the U.S. sites that we've found are down (see figure 5.18).
meiiutir opper from arthie.lnternir.net
Name
Size Dale Zone Host
Path
D menudropper7.1b8.cpt.h<jx 203k 8/20/93 T
D menudropper7.1b8xpt.hqx 203k 8/29/93 5
D menudropper7.1b8.cpt.hqx 203k 8/29/93 5
D menudropper7.1b8.cpt.hqx Ik 10/18/93 5
1
vuarchive.wustl.edu /sqstems/mac/umich.fdu/system.extensions/cdev/menudropper7.1b8.cpt.hqx
plaza. aarnel edu.au /micros/mac/umKh/sy$tem.extensions/cdev/menudropper7.1b8.cpti»qx
ftp .sunet.se /pub/mac /mirror-umich/sy stem .extensior»/cdev /menudropper7 . 1 bS.cpt i>qx
ftp sunet.se /pub/mao/mirror-umich/system.extensions/cdev/,App1eDoubIe/menudropper7 IbS.cptbqx
menu-dropf>er from arctile.intGrnlc.net
N»m» Size Dele Zone Host Pelh
Q menu-dropper-7 1 b4 .hqx 291< 6/8/93 1 wuarchive.wufll.edu /systems/mac/info-mac/01d/gul/menu-dropper-71b4 hqx
□ menu-dropper-71b6.hqx 57k 7/9/93 1 wuarchive.wusll edu /systems/mac/info-mac/0ld/gui/menu-dropper-71b6 hqx
□ menu-dropper-7 IbSa.hqx 203k 8/26/93 1 sumex-akn slanford.edu /info-mac/qui/mer*u-dropper-71t>8a hqx
D menu-dropper-71b8a.hqx 203k 8/25/93 1 wuarchive.wufll.edu /syslemf/mao/info-mac/gu1/menu-dropper-71b8a.hqx
D menu-dropper-7 1b8a hqx 203k 8/27/93 5 llh.se /mac/infO"mao/gu1/menu-dropper-71b8a.hqx
D menu-dropper-71b8a.hqx 203k 8/26/93 5 ftp.sunet.se /pub/mac/info-mao/gui/menu-dropper-7lb8a.hqx
D menu-dropper-71b8a.hqx 203k 8/27/93 5 sics.se /'pub/info-mac/qui/menu-dropper-7lb9a.hqx
D menu-dropper-71b8ai>qx 203k 8/26/93 5 plaza. aarnel edu au /micros/mao/info-mac/qu1/menu-dropper-71b8a.hqx
menu-dropper-7 IbBa.hqH
Host; ftp.sunet.se
Status: Working
State: Tronsfering
Result: 150 Opening ASCil nnode data connection for
Transferred; 57440
1 . .. 1
Figure 5.18 The Scaitdinavian version of MenuDropper.
Adam: Luckily, it's early evening here in Seattle, which means that it should be the
middle of the night in Sweden, where the file we're snagging lives. If you must use a site
on the other side of the ocean, please try to do so in the middle of the night there, when
you aren't likely to interrupt people trying to do real work.
Bill: I‘ve heard of a game called Bolo that can supposedly be played over
the Internet. You can locate ongoing games and join in, teaming up with
and fighting against people you've never met. Could be fun.
Adam: Sounds like you've been watcliing too much violence on television again. But sure,
let's see if we can find it.
Bill: Shall we do an Anarchie search? We know what we're after, and it's
a program, so we know it'll be stored at an FTP site. This kind of search
is what Archie was made for, and Anarchie will make it easy to retrieve
the file once we've found it.
Adam: In many cases, you'd be right about a situation like this. But Bolo's extremely
popular, and there has been an awful lot of Bolo-oriented stuff produced. I suspect you
may be disappointed by Archie on this one.
Bill: Good lord, you're right. Anarchie was set to tell us about the
first 100 items it found with "bolo" in their names, and it did that
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 91
admirably —unfortunately , the actual game itself didn't turn up in the
list! We'd have to boost that 100-item limit way up to find the program,
I bet.
Adam: I can't quite say why, but this feels like a job for Veronica. Since it's just as easy to
retrieve files via TurboGopher as with Anarchie, there's no real reason not to search with
Veronica and, if it finds anything, download directly in TurboGopher. The only thing I
don't like about downloading files in TurboGopher is that it doesn't tell you how large
the file is, so you don't know how long it will take, or how far along you are at any given
time. Nevertheless, there are a ton of Bolo folders and one of them contains Bolo 0.99.2
(see figure 5.19).
bolo I
0 Internet Gopher ©1991-1993 University of Minnesota.
(s) 00bolo-abs tracts. abs
0 al t-netgones-bolo-faq-l? .hqi
Hbiola-raap.hqx
B bniap -ed i t -14 . hq X
Elbolo-0992.hqx
0bolo-distant-early-warning.hqx
0 bo I 0 -d r aw n -and -qua r te red . hq X
0bolo-finder-102.hqx
0bolo-niacdraw-inap.hqx
0bolo -map-continental .hqx
0bolo-map-edl tor-096. hqx
0bolo -map -editor -100. hqx
0 bolo-nap-generator-097 .hqx
0bolo -nap - i mpene t rob I e . hq X
About Bolo
Bolo is a macintosh tank game you play against opponents across the world.
In these directory are the bolo faq, and bolo itself, along with the bolo
tracker and extra maps.
mi
HE
bolo-0992.hqH j
0 Finished decodiny BinHexed file "Boto992packaye.cpt'‘
Figure 5.19 More than one way to skin a tank game.
Adam: For our last "thing" search, let's find a weather map. Tm pretty sure some of those
exist on the Internet, and it would be nice to see what sort of weather we're having right
now.
Bill: Why don't you look out the window?
Adam: Because it's dark.
Bill: Oh, right, you live in the 'burbs. There aren't many streetlights
outside of the city.
Adam: Okay, let's see if we can figure out what sort of weather system is over the East
coast, hammering on our parents.
Bill: For the reader at home, it's hard to tell, but this is taking a
while. If you like, I could entertain you with my rendition of various
pirate songs from Peter Pan while we wait.
Parti
92 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Adam: No, wait! Tve found a weather map. It wasn't as easy as I thought it should have
been, though. I did a Veronica search on "weather map" but every one of the folders of
weather maps that it found turned out to be a bum steer.
Bill: Interesting mental picture on that phrase. So that's what was hap-
pening when you were downloading that file for twenty minutes. I thought
you were downloading Willard Scott himself for a while there.
Adam: Yeah, I didn't time it, but the file was almost two megabytes large and was a
gorgeous satellite picture of the planet, complete with white parts that might have been
clouds.
Bill: Oh, yeah, I see it. It's pretty, why don't we use that figure?
Adam: Because you can't tell from the picture what part of the planet you're even
looking at.
Bill: Hmm. True. In fact, you can't even tell which planet it is. How do
weatherbeings interpret this stuff? You might as well hand them a
Picasso.
Adam: No kidding. But I did eventually figure out how to find a better map of the United
States. I remember seeing something about weather once in a list of Internet resources
maintained by Scott Yanoff. You can get a copy of this list from Scott's machine, and you
can find out what machine that is by using Finger on Scott's address. I've done this before
so my copy of Finger remembered it.
Bill: Lucky.
Adam: I prefer to think of it as foresight. Anyway, once I retrieved the entire Special
Internet Services list, I found a site mentioned as having weather information, so I went
there with TurboGopher, found the maps, and downloaded one (see figure 5.20).
Adam: Moving on to less concrete problems, here's a question that has always
bothered me.
Bill: What's that?
Adam: What are the risks of buying gas at a gas station with a credit card from one of
those automated pumps? I like using them since they're a lot faster than dealing with the
cashier, particularly if they make you pay first and go back for change. But, at the same
time, I've seen a bunch of receipts just lying around, which says to me that people don't
particularly protect their credit card numbers.
There's a fabulous mailing list called Risks Digest that focuses on the risks of technology,
and I'll bet this is the sort of thing that they've talked about at some point. I've noticed
postings from that group come up when I search the Connection Machine Server via
WAIS, so let's see if there is anything (see figure 5.21).
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 93
yanotf<5csd4.csd. uujm.edu (129
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ST
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CALL
ffA SEATTLE
WA SEA
Login naraa: yanoff In real life: Scott fl Vanoff
Office: EMS E774, ex-3886
Directory; /usr/u3/yanof f Shell: /u*r/bln/
On since Feb 22 21:47:36 on ttyr6 fron ems- ts5 . csd . uu;
New mail arrived Tue Feb 22 23:32:15 1994; unread sin
1994
Project: Tuesday (2/22): BUCKS: 113 Warriors: 12
Plan:
♦ fls the author of the IMTERNET SERUICES LIST, I have made updat|
available in a number of ways: Cflvai loble 1st and 15th of
1> newsgroup al t. internet. services
2> f tp/gopher csd4 . csd . uwm . edu (get /pub/ 1 ne t. serv i ces. txtl
3> mail bbsl istSaug3.augsburg.edu (Ruto-repI ies with listsj
4) email me WITH THE SUBJECT 'yan-inet' to get on my email
and you will receive confirmation of your subscr i p t i on .
(This Is the LEAST preferred method, my mai ler is getting stra
FEB 23 FEB 24 FEB 25 FEB 26 FEB 27 FEB 28 MAR 1
TMP NR TMP NR TMP NR TMP NR TMP NR TMP NR TMP NR
MIN 38 38 38 38 40 38 41 38 43 38 43 38 45 38
MAX 48 51 49 51 50 51 50 51 50 51 53 51 55 51
U.IH. atmos.uiuc.edu
0 Gopher ©1991-1993
la :The UoFI Weather Machine
Bl :Tour oF The Archives
[5l : maintenance
12l : the. mirror. sites
CD Canada
D Caribbean
dCase Studies
^Documents
D Illinois
d Images
CUMisc
Clio the r Servers
CD Regional
C] Satellite Discussion
CD Severe
C] States
C] Surface
C] Upper
01 web. servers
0 Internet Ooph*r © 1 99 1 - 1 993 University
01 Hourly Temp tfea (3htl)
IS) National Flood Summary
01 Radar Natl Ascii Maps
0 SELS Years Severe Weather
0 SELS Yesterdays Severe Weather
0 Selected Cities Fcsts (Abi-Col)
0 Selected Cities Fcsts (Con-Lei)
0 Selected Cities Fcsts (Lin-St)
0 Selected Cities Fcsts (San-YUm)
0 Seven Day Min-Max Temp Fcst (Eastern)
0 Seven Day Min-Max Temp Fcst (Midwest)
0 Seven Day Min-Max Temp Fcst (Northwest)
!§1 Seven Dav Min-Mox Temp Fcst fSouthvestl
6? Exploring the
^ Internet
Figure 5.20 Fifty percent chance of something in your area tonight.
Bill: That's one thing I like about WAIS, the ability to use real English
sentences as you did there, "Tell me about using a gas pump and a credit
card." But I've never seen anything in that "Which are similar to" box
before. What's that for?
Adam: Glad you asked. That box provides a truly interesting part of WAIS called ''rel-
evance feedback." Relevance feedback is a phrase that basically means: "Show me more like
this one." So, in the example above, I first searched for the search phrase alone and found
a few articles that matched what I wanted, but there were also some that were far from
the subject. By asking WAIS to find more like the article, I dropped in the relevance
feedback box, I narrowed the search and found more articles that were on the topic I
wanted. You can do that with either an entire article, as I did above, or with just a part of
an article.
94 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Credit Card Risks
Look for documents about
Tell me about using a gas pump and a credit card.
1
1 1 I
VMoh are similar to In these sources
g| RISKS DIGEST 1 3.07 : Credit cards at gas pi
<•> Conneotion-Hachine Server
Results 15 documents
E) las
IK
E) ■
3K
E) ■
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2K
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3K
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4K
RISKS DK3EST 1 3.07 : Cr»dU o«rds at gas pumps
RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .05 ; Ra : A risky gas pump (from RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .03)
RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .05: Ra: A risky gas pump (RISKS-1 1 .03)
RISKS DIGEST 11 .05 : Ra : A risky gas pump
RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .1 1 ; Ra : A risky gas pump
RISKS DIGEST 1 2.21 : Banks, Cradit Cards, and Short Namas (Re ; RISKS-1 2.1 9
RISKS DIGEST 11.11: Cashless gas pumps; altarnatlve to cradit card use
RISKS DIGEST 1 4.09: Teller machine networks
RISKS contributions (I try to sun-dry sundry massages...]: Cradit Card Loss V
RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .1 1 : Re : A risky gas pump (Grumbine, RISKS-1 1 .03)
RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .05 : Re : A risky gas pump
RISKS DIGEST 1 1 .05 : Re : A Risky Gas Pump (devil's advocate)
RISKSDIGEST11.il Re n risky gas pump
This is a new risk, alloving the use of a credit card with no trace teck on who
used the card, no signature to forge, no pin code to break, nothing. There Is
no license plate recorded or anything else. You could take a valid charge and
say that it was not valid, hov do they prove It was? They take a charge that
is Invalid, how do you prove it was not? Normally you can request the charge
slip and so It can be shown that it was not your signature, but in this case
anyone who has access to the card can use It. If someone borrowed your card,
you at least stand a chance of detecting who it was based on the signature.
d
Figure 5.21 Name, number, and expiration date, please.
Bill: Clever. That would allow you to narrow the search, as you did, or
broaden it by loosening the original parameters while allowing the rel-
evance feedback to keep the answers on track.
Adam: Relevance feedback requires a good WAIS program on the Mac or PC, though, and
although you can search through a WAIS database from within Gopher or the World
Wide Web, clients for those two generally don't support WAIS's fancier features, like
relevance feedback, quite as well. That's why I generally prefer to use MacWAIS when-
ever I'm searching in WAIS. The same principle applies elsewhere, so, for instance,
although you can retrieve files stored on an FTP site with TurboGopher, it's not as good at
doing so as Anarchie or Fetch from Dartmouth College. Similarly, even though the World
Wide Web servers can show you the contents of Gopher sites. Mosaic isn't nearly as slick
as TurboGopher when it comes to navigating through Gopherspace. There's always a
right tool for the job.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 95
Owning an Internet Press
Adam: Since the beginning of time, or at least since Gutenberg first stamped out his Bible,
people have wanted to publish. After all, someone clever said that freedom of the press
goes to those who have a press. The obstacles to becoming a publisher are vast, but
generally boil down to money, as so much does these days. To publish a simple newslet-
ter today you must pay for design and production and printing and distribution, and you
probably even must buy a mailing list from some guy wearing a trench coat in a dark
alley.
Bill: But on the Internet, many of these problems disappear, or are at
least made far more manageable. Newsletters, magazines, fiction and the
like abound, all published by people who probably couldn't dream of being
able to publish their work in the standard way.
Adam: As this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, we'll start by talking about
newsletters, and my very own TidBlTS.
Newsletters
Adam: Tm not quite sure of the technical difference between a newsletter and a magazine,
but it seems to be related primarily to length. Newsletters are generally under twenty
pages or so, and magazines usually seem to check in closer to one hundred or more pages.
The small size of newsletters makes them easy to distribute through email and Usenet
news, which is a big plus. This is the route Tonya and I took with TidBlTS.
Bill: Of course, even if you paid for nothing else to put out your news-
letter, there's still the question of your own time. Do you make any
money on TidBlTS to compensate for the time you spend on it?
Adam: We do, although it was hard to decide how to go about it. After much thought, we
settled on a Public Broadcasting-style sponsorship program for TidBlTS. We set it up so
that our sponsors can distribute more information directly to interested readers via
email — those w^ho are interested send an email message to a specific address mentioned
in the issue, and the information comes back automatically.
Bill: Pretty neat setup. Why don't you tell us more about TidBlTS itself?
I'd like to show our readers what these publications are like, not just
the logistics of publishing them over the Internet.
Adam: Okay. In TidBlTS we cover all sorts of new^s related to the world of the Macintosh,
although the actual mission statement is to report on anything computer-related that
interests me, which often includes information on the Internet and electronic communica-
tions.
Bill: Egotist.
Parti
96 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Adam: Realist. If it doesn't interest me, I won't write about it well. I also have a short
attention span and become interested in lots of different topics. Every now and then I
worry that no one is interested in what I'm writing, but the readership continues to grow
and provide positive feedback, so I guess that's not a major problem.
At first, being personally interested in every topic was especially important, since I wrote
90 percent of the articles in the first year, and although I continue to write a large number,
many other people help out. We encourage other people to submit articles.
Bill: As a matter of fact, even I've contributed an article or two. You
didn't pay me anything, though— does anyone earn anything from writing
for TidBITS?
Adam: Not directly, since we don't earn anything from the direct distribution of each
issue either — the sponsorships are for the act of publishing TidBITS so they pay for the
hardware, software, and connection expenses that we incur, not to mention the long
hours I put in each week researching articles, writing articles, editing articles, and gener-
ally putting the entire issue together. Tonya contributes articles occasionally, and edits
each issue, which makes the issues much better than they would be otherwise.
However, if you've ever tried to submit an article to MacUser or Maaoorld, you know how
hard that is. I'm not nearly as picky as they are because I don't have a staff that's paid to
write. I also don't pretend to be an expert on every topic, so although I'll happily write
about Internet topics, say, I try to get other people to write about high-end desktop
publishing or databases, about which I know little. So, writing for TidBITS is a way to
practice writing, assuming you have some valuable knowledge to share, of course, a way
to see how your writing might be edited, and a way to become published.
Bill: Speaking from the point of view of somebody who's just breaking
into this professional writing stuff, is an article for TidBITS going to
look as good on a resume as an article for Macworld?
Adam: That I don't know, since I'm not the sort who particularly cares about where
someone has been published before. If you're an expert about something and you write
well, I couldn't care less if you've been published somewhere. I think it's generally a
matter of someone who's paying for an article wanting to know that some other publica-
tion took a risk on paying you for a different article. I hope that some of the people who
write for TidBITS get to use us as proof that they're good writers. Hey, it worked for you.
Bill: Oh. Did it?
Adam: Sure, it's not as though I ever read your newsletter. Moose Droppings, or Superguy
Digest — I knew you could write your way out of a paper bag because of the stuff you did
for TidBITS, And the email we've exchanged, of course, but that's slightly different.
Bill: Oh. I'll consider myself flattered. How else is TidBITS different
from a normal newsletter?
Adam: The part that I both love and hate is that it's really easy for most of our readers to
reply to articles that they read in TidBITS. I enjoy this immensely when they pass on
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 97
information I didn't know, or make insightful comments, or even just write to say that
they appreciate TidBlTS, It's good for the psyche.
Bill: And the bad part?
Adam: Do you know how hard it is to reply to over 150 personal messages each day?
Some days I spend so much time replying to email that I have no time to even think about
writing new articles for the next issue, much less working on these books. I also don't like
it when time constraints force me to be more terse than I'd like. I prefer to explain fully
when answering a question, but it's gotten so that it takes too long.
The other reason for keeping TidBlTS relatively small is that I'm sure most of our readers
are busy people, too, and they probably allot a certain amount of time to read TidBlTS
each week. If I doubled the size one week, they'd have to spend twice as much time
reading. It's easier to stick with the formula that has worked for so many years, streamlin-
ing and enhancing when appropriate, but not for the sake of change alone.
Bill: The small size also helps in distribution, of course.
Adam: Definitely. At 30K per week, TidBlTS fits in email relatively well and also traverses
Usenet in the comp . sy s . mac . digest group. If it were a couple of hundred kilobytes
large, I wouldn't be able to use the newsgroup for distribution as easily, and people
would dislike receiving it in email as well. TidBlTS is also available on the World Wide
Web and Gopher servers.
Magazines and Books
Adam: There are an increasing number of paper magazines that have in some way
expanded to the Internet. They don't usually publish the full text of their articles on the
Internet, and none attempt to recreate the entire look of the magazine online. That may
change, although I expect that the reluctance is entirely due to the fact that they cannot
easily charge for the magazines on the Internet.
Bill: There are also some technical problems, of course. Some new soft-
ware would permit easy electronic transmission of magazines while retain-
ing the original look of the publication, but those programs aren't free
and are far from widespread.
Adam: And besides, people aren't accustomed to paying for Internet services and most
likely would decide that there are plenty of other good things to check out instead of the
commercial resource.
Bill: That makes sense. I wouldn't pay for most things on the Internet,
not because they aren't good, but, as you say, because there are plenty
that are good and free. Many of these are magazines and journals that
exist solely on the Internet, with no paper counterpart.
Adam: Wired magazine, one that does cross over between the Internet and standard print
media, appeared about a year ago and has grown quickly in popularity, being as someone
in IRC said, "the tabloid of the electronic geek set." Another friend said something to the
Parti
98 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
effect of Wired's motto being "The world is ending, but you can buy cool stuff." Appar-
ently, Wired's editor didn't think this was particularly funny, which may indicate the
existence of a grain of sand from which can grow a pearl of truth.
Bill: Pithy. A tortuous metaphor, but pithy.
Adam: Thanks. I think. I like reading the magazine though, since more so than most of the
ones I get, there are actual honest to goodness ideas in Wired. At this point in my life, I
have a voracious appetite for ideas, and even if I don't always agree with Wired's articles,
I find them interesting. That FurryMUCK article was pretty one-sided, though, and with
the headline, "MUDS: Sex with the FurryMUCKers" on the cover, rather unfair, I thought.
Bill: It certainly distressed enough people— er, furries on FurryMUCK
itself, as we could plainly see when we visited.
Adam: Wired has done quite well, nonetheless, at putting its Internet access where its
mouth is, so to speak.
Bill: I suppose it does sound rather hypocritical to wax lyrical about
the coolness of the Internet but not provide any Internet resources.
Adam: Precisely. Wired has set up a rather well-designed World Wide Web server for
anyone to use, and they have released the full text of articles in back issues of the maga-
zine. Good thing, since two of mine were lost in the mail at some point while moving last
year (see figure 5.22).
Bill: Magazines and other periodicals are one thing, but what about those
of us who prefer to read novels? Are there any actual books available on
the Internet?
Adam: Absolutely. One of the most fascinating and ambitious projects on the Internet
must be Project Gutenberg, conceived of and ably directed by Midiael Hart. Project
Gutenberg's goal is to give away one trillion electronic texts by December 31, 2001.
Bill: That's a lot of electronic books!
Adam: Yup, but Project Gutenberg only anticipates distributing 10,000 separate titles —
their one trillion number comes from the one hundred million people they anticipate will
read their texts by that time. I don't believe they have any way of tracking how many
readers they get.
Bill: Even still, 10,000 is a lot. How are they managing it?
Adam: It's quite clever, actually. Project Gutenberg started in the early 70s. They work on
a doubling scheme, so in 1993 they released four books each month, and in 1994, they
hope to release eight books each month. It's like that game on a checkerboard, where you
put down a penny on the first square, two pennies on the second square, four pennies on
the third square, and so on. It adds up to a huge amount of money, and similarly Project
Gutenberg will end up with a huge number of electronic texts.
Chapter 5 ♦ Exploring the Internet 99
UMRED Maqazine*s Rest Stop on the Infobahn
▼ I [
Welcome to WIRED Magazine s World Wide Web server,
UMRED 1.1 “ Table of Contents
UMRED 1.1 - Table of Co
a
^1
(i
URL: iht<p //vww v<r»d.com/Et»xt/1 .1 /;
Toys for the Truly Wired
[ Electric Word
Bulletin from the front line of the
Digital Revolution
a
r
m
Is interacOve dead?
Max Whitby wonders
whether narrative is
making a comeback
1
Figure 5.22 Better graphics than most Web sites.
Bill: Where do they get their material? Electronic texts don't grow on
directory trees, you know.
Adam: Perhaps the most impressive part of the entire project is that it's done entirely with
volunteer labor by hundreds of people around the world. For instance, you could type a
book into the computer, proofread it, and submit it to Project Gutenberg, assuming of
course, that it was out of copyright or that it was done with permission. I suspect that
most people use scanners to capture the pages of the book and then use optical character
recognition software to turn it into editable text.
Bill: Working in a Popular Copy Shop has taught me that copyright can be
a very tricky business. How do they handle it, making sure that a book is
indeed in the public domain?
Adam: There are some basic rules, although I gather that copyright searches make up a
large portion of the work for Project Gutenberg volunteers now. Needless to say, such a
Exploring the
Internet
100 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
loose organization cannot afford to be sued by a large publisher for copyright infringe-
ment. The rule they use most often states that works first published before January 1, 1978
usually enter the public domain 75 years from the date copyright was first secured, which
usually means 75 years from the date of first publication. There are a number of other
variations on this, and in other countries the general rule is the life of the author plus 50
years, but exceptions exist, and even today, the electronic version of Peter Pan comes with
a note that says it may not be downloaded outside of the United States due to some
strange copyright deal.
Bill: That raises the question of foreign language texts. Do they work
with them at all? And how do they feel about some of the alternative
distribution methods we talked about above?
Adam: They only concern themselves with English language texts, and prefer to use
straight text since it's universal. However, when you're in the position of Project
Gutenberg, if someone wants to give you a copy of an electronic text in, say. Acrobat
format, you're not going to turn it down. And although they primarily make their works
available in text format, I imagine that's primarily a limitation of volunteer labor — they
would love to be able to make versions available on the World Wide Web and in Acrobat
format, and so on.
Bill: Project Gutenberg is extremely impressive, and highly ambitious. It
sounds like a huge amount of work. What keeps them going?
Adam: It's hard to say for sure, since I'm sure everyone does it for a slightly different
reason. I don't know if they will reach their goals, but I do know that they have provided
a storehouse of useful and interesting information for today's Internet. Also, the volun-
teers who make Project Gutenberg happen stand as a shining example of what normal
people can do on the Internet if they want to. Perhaps that's what impresses me the most
about many of these publishing projects — it's amazing what the human mind can do if it
merely wants to and is given the freedom to express itself widely via the Internet.
Moving On
Adam: Now that we've had a quick little jaunt around the Internet, let's move on to
discussing some of the nuts and bolts of how the Internet actually works. Keep what
you've seen here in mind; when I explain specific tools to you later on, think about how
they can help you explore the Internet and find your own way through the maze of
information.
Bill: And hey, if you liked this chapter, check out our other bookl That
v/ill help me eat something besides microwave burritos from time to time!
Adam: That may be the most blatant plug I've ever seen, Bill.
Bill: True. I have no shame. 'Bye, folks, and enjoy the rest of the bookl
Adam: Thanks for the help. Bill!
t
Par
Internet Foundations
So far, we've looked at the Internet in the abstract only, and it's important that you
have an overview of the world you are entering. Like all things electronic, however,
the Internet is terribly picky about the details; you must know exactly what to type
and where to click. Moreover, unlike on your friendly local Macintosh, on the
Internet real people see what you type, so I also talk about the social customs of the
Internet, the manners and mores that everyone eventually learns. And, because I
hope the Internet becomes something about which you talk with friends, I try to
pass on some of the jargon and modes of speech.
Chapter 6 covers the basics of "Addressing & URLs" so you can figure out how
email addresses and machine names are formed. In it, I also talk about Uniform
Resources Locators, or URLs, which are used on the Internet to provide a coherent
method of identifying Internet resources such as Web pages and files available via
FTP. Chapter 7, "Email Basics," focuses on email usage and mailing lists, and
chapter 8, "Usenet News Basics," is devoted exclusively to Usenet news. Chapter 9
describes "TCP/IP Internet Services," those being services that require a full Internet
connection, such as Telnet, FTP, WAIS, Gopher, and the World Wide Web (although
I do pass on a few tricks for using Usenet, FTP, Archie, and even the Web through
email in chapter 7). Finally, chapter 10, "File Formats," discusses the many file
formats you find on the Internet.
Keep in mind that this information is all background — I don't tell you the specific
details of how to deal with programs on the Internet or anything like that, until Part
III and IV. Nevertheless, I feel that this is important background, so unless you've
spent a fair amount of time on the Internet already, I recommend that you read
through these chapters.
Text Styles
As a convention, I write all network addresses, whether they are machine names,
full email addresses, or URLs, in this monospaced font. Note also that any punctua-
tion following the address is not part of the address itself; instead, it's required by
my seventh grade English teacher, who was adamant about ending clauses with
commas and sentences with periods. Every now and then, I leave off a period when
it confuses an address that ends a sentence, but the thought of her beet-red face (I'm
sure she was very nice, but she reminded me of a lobster) looming over always
makes me add that period. So remember that addresses never have any punctuation
at the end.
Commands that you type exactly as written look like this; when there is a variable
that you have to fill in, it looks like this. So, TYPE this means to type the word
TYPE, followed by whatever is appropriate for this: your name, a file name, a
directory name, a machine name, or whatever.
Finally, any text that shows up as though it scrolled by on a terminal window
appears in its ov\m monospaced font, line-by-line, much like the following lines.
To: The Reader <reader@iskm.book.net>
Subject: Style conventions
From: Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
I hope these conventions don't seem too onerous - it can be hard in a
book to show precisely what the user sees, as opposed to what was or
should be typed.
cheers . . . -Adam
Chapter
Addressing & URLs
Before I can tell you about email, retrieving files via FTP, browsing the Web, or much of
anything else, I must discuss how email addresses and machine names are formed, where
they come from, and that sort of thing. Along with these details about email addresses
and machine names, you must learn about URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators. URLs
provide a coherent method of uniquely identifying resources on the Internet, ranging
from Web pages to files available via FTP to WAIS sources. But let's start at the
beginning...
Addressing
A rose may be a rose by any other name, but the same is not true of an Internet computer.
All Internet computers think of each other in terms of numbers (not surprisingly), and all
people think of them in terms of names (also not surprisingly). The Internet uses the
domain name system to make sense of the millions of machines that make up the Internet.
In terms of the numbers, each machine's address is composed of four numbers, each less
than 256. People are generally bad about remembering more than the seven digits of a
phone number, so the folks working in this field came up with a program called a domain
name server. Domain name servers translate between the numeric addresses and the
names; real people can remember and use the names while real computers can continue
to refer to each other by number. That way, everyone is happy.
Note Note
104
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Domain name servers, although geuerallx/ part of the background technology that enables the
Internet to work seamlessly, are tremendously important. Without them, very little on the
Internet works these days.
Despite the fact that all Internet numeric addresses are sets of four numbers, the corre-
sponding name can have between two and five sets of words. After five, it gets out of
hand, so although it's possible, it's not generally done. For instance, one of the machines
I use now is called king .tidbits . com (three words), and the machine I used at Cornell
was called Cornelia . cit . Cornell . edu (four words). The domain style addresses may
look daunting, but in fact they are quite easy to work with, especially when you consider
the numeric equivalents, such as 204.57.157.13 for king.tidbits.com. Each item in
those addresses, separated by the periods, is called a domain, and in the following sec-
tions, you are going to look at them backward, or in terms of the largest domain to the
smallest.
A random aside for those of you who are students of classical rhetoric: The process of intro-
ducing topics A, B, and C, and then discussing them in the order C, B, and A is called
chiasmus. This little hwwn fact is entirely unrelated to the Internet, except that after the
first edition of this book I took a lot of good-natured ribbing on the Internet about my
classical education, so I figured I should at least pretend to know somethmg about the topic.
Top-level Domains
In any machine name, the final word after the last dot is the top-level domain, and a limited
number of them exist. Originally, and this shows the Internet's early Americo-centric
view, six top-level domains indicated to what type of organization the machine belonged.
Thus, we ended up with the following list:
■ com = commercial
■ edu = educational
■ org = organization, usually nonprofit
■ mil = military
■ net = network
■ gov = government
Note
Chapter 6 ♦ Addressing & URLs 105
That setup was all fine and dandy for starters, but as the number of machines on the
Internet began to grow at an amazing rate, a more all-encompassing solufion became
necessary. The new top-level domains are based on countries, so each country has its own
two-letter domain. Thus, the United Kingdom's top-level domain is uk, Sweden's is se,
Japan's is j p, Australia's is au, and so on. Every now and then another country comes on
the Internet, and I see a domain code that totally throws me, as Iceland's is code did the
first time.
If you'd like to see the complete list of country codes, check out this URL:
http : / /WWW. nw. com/ zone/ iso -country -codes
The United States has this system, too; so, for example, The Well, a popular commercial
service with links to the Internet, is well . sf . ca . us. Unfortunately, because so many sites
already existed with the old domain names, it made no sense to change them. Thus, we
have both types of top-level domain names here in the U.S., and you just have to live
with it.
You may see a couple of other top-level domains on occasion, bitnet and uucp, such as
in listserv@bitnic - bitnet or ace@tidbits . uucp. In both of these cases, the top-level
domain indicates that the machine is on one of the alternative networks and may not exist
directly on the Internet (otherwise, it would have a normal top-level domain such as com
or uk). This setup isn't a big deal these days because so many machines exist on two
networks that your email gets through just fine in most cases. In the past, though, few
connections existed between the Internet and BITNET or Usenet, so getting mail through
one of the existing gateways was more difficult. Keep in mind that because a machine
whose name ends with bitnet or uucp is not usually on the Internet, you cannot use
Telnet or FTP with it.
Many machine names are as simple as it gets: a machine name and a top-level domain.
Others are more complex because of additional domains in the middle. Think of an
address such as Cornelia . cit . Cornell . edu as one of those nested Russian dolls (see
figure 6.1). The outermost doll is the top-level domain, the next few dolls are the mid-
level domains, and, if you go all the way in, the final doll is the userid (which I'll explain
soon enough).
Part II
106
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 6.1 The Russian doll approach to Internet addresses.
Mid-level Domains
What do these mid-level domains represent? It's hard to say precisely, because the answer
can vary a bit. The machine I used at Cornell, known as comella.cit.cornell.edu, represents
one way the mid-level domains have been handled. The machine name is Cornelia, and
the top-level domain is edu, because Cornell claims all those undergraduates are there to
get an education. The cit after Cornelia is the department, Cornell Information Tech-
nologies, that runs the machine known as Cornelia. The next part, Cornell, is obvious;
it's the name of the overall organization to which CIT belongs. So, for this machine
anyway, the hierarchy of dolls is, in order, machine name, department name, organization
name, and organization type.
This is similar to how my system is set up now, since I control the tidbits . com domain,
and each of my Macs has a name within that domain. So, for instance, my desktop Mac is
called penguin.tidbits.com, and my server is king.tidbits.com.
In the machine name for The Well, well . sf . ca . us, you see a geographic use of mid-level
domains. In this case, well is the machine name, sf is the city name (San Francisco), ca is
the state name (California), and us is the country code for the United States.
Mid-level domains spread the work around. Obviously, the Internet can't have machines
with the same name; otherwise, chaos would erupt. But because the domain name system
allows for mid-level domains, the administrators for those mid-level domains must make
sure that everj'one below them stays unique. In other words, I could actually name my
machine cornella . tidbits . com because that name is completely different from
cornella.cit.cornell.edu (though why I'd want to, I don't know). And, if they
wanted, the administrators at CIT could put a new machine on the net and call it
tidbits . cit . cornell.edu without any trouble, for the same reason. More importantly,
the administrators don't need to bother anyone else if they want to make that change.
They control the cit domain, and as long as all the machines within that domain have
unique names, there aren't any problems. Of course, someone has to watch the top-level
Note
Chapter 6 ♦ Addressing & URLs 107
domains because it's all too likely that H\'o people may want tidbits . com as a domain
(but I've already got it, so they can't have it). That task is handled by the Internet Network
Information Center, or InterNIC. As a user, you shouldn't have to worry about naming
problems, because everyone should have a system administrator who knows who to talk
to, and you need the cooperation of your provider anyway — you can't set up a domain on
your own.
There is yet another way to handle the mid-level domains, this time in terms of inter-
mediate computers. Before I got my current address, I had a connection from a
machine called halcyon, whose full name was halcyon.com. My machine name was
tidbits.halcyon.com. In this case, tidbits was my machine name, halcyon was the
machine through which all of my mail was routed, and com indicated that the connection
was through a commercial organization. I realize that this example is a bit confusing, but
1 mention it because it's one way that you can pretend to have an Internet address when
you really have only a UUCP connection (a different sort of connection that transfers only
email and news). All my mail and news came in via UUCP through halcyon, so by
including halcyon in my address, I created an Internet-style address.
The other way of pretending that a UUCP connection is a real Internet connection for
address purposes, is to have your host set up an MX record (where MX stands for Mail
Exchange). An MX record is a pointer on several true Internet machines to your site.
Machine Name
The next part in the full domain name is the machine itself; for example, in the name
penguin . tidbits . com, penguin, is the name of my machine. In my case, the machine is a
Macintosh 660AV, but people use all sorts of machines, and because the system adminis-
trators often are a punchy, overworked lot, they tend to give machines silly names. Large
organizations with more centralized control lean more toward thoroughly boring names,
like the machine at Cornell, which was called Cornelia (as opposed to cornellc and
cornelld and cornellf ).
For those ivho are wondering, the naming scheme 1 use is based on the names of species of
penguins. Also, if you're wondering why you can send email to ace&tidbits.com if my
machine is really called penguin . tidbits . com, it's because of the magic of the domain
name system. Since most people like shorter addresses, it's common to map the shorter
domain name, tidbits.com, to point to the server that handles mail specifically,
king, tidbits.com in my case. Then, I set Eudora to look for mail on
king, tidbits.com and cvenjthing works swimmingly. These are the sort of machinations
that Internet providers continually deal with. Luckily, you as the user can usually ignore
them.
Part II
108 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
One of the reasons for boring names is that in the early days, machines on BITNET had to
have names with between six and eight characters. Coming up with a meaningful unique
name within that restriction became increasingly difficult. Usenet doesn't put a limit on
the length of names, but it requires that the first six characters be unique. Currently, the
Internet allows the second level domain to be up to 24 characters, and the third level
domain can be up to 72 characters. In no case can the full domain name go over 256
characters, however.
If you remember that machines often exist on the Internet as well as on one of these other
networks, thereby blurring the distinctions, you'll see the problem. The limitations of
Internet machine names are less rigid, so alternative connections dictate what names are
acceptable.
Often, special services keep their names even when they move to different machines or
even different organizations. Because of this situation, a machine that runs a service may
have two names, one that goes with the machine normally and one that points solely at
that service. For instance, the anonymous FTP site that I use to store all the software I talk
about in this book is called f tp . tidbits . com. But in fact, it runs on a machine called
ftp . halcyon . com, and I could move it to any other machine while still retaining the
ftp .tidbits . com name. This situation is not a big deal one way or another.
To summarize, you can have multiple domains in a machine name, and the further you go
to the right, the more general they become, often ending in the country code. Conversely,
the further you go to the left, the more specific the domains become, ending in the ma-
chine name because it's the most specific.
But what about email addresses, which have userids? They're even more specific than
machine names, because you can have many userids on a single machine.
Userid
Now that you've looked at the machine name, you can move on to the userid or username,
which identifies a specific user on a machine. Both terms are equally correct (with two
exceptions — the commercial online service GEnie and the FirstClass BBS softw^are both
treat userids and usernames separately) and commonly used. If you set up your own
machine, or work with a sufficiently flexible provider, you can choose your own user-
name. Choosing your own name is good because then your correspondents can more
easily remember your address, assuming of course that you choose a userid that makes
sense and is easy to type. If I made my address ferdinand-the-bull@tidbits.com,
people who typed the address slightly wrong and had their mail bounced back to them
would become irritated at me.
Unlike Macintosh filenames (and America Online and eWorld userids), Internet userids
cannot have spaces in them, so convention dictates that you replace any potential spaces
with underscores, dashes, or dots, or omit them entirely. Other reasonable userids that I
Chapter 6 ♦ Addressmg & URLs 109
could use (but don't) include adam_engst@tidbits.com or adam-engst@tidbits.com or
adam . engst@tidbits . com or adamengst@tidbit s . com. However, all of these names are
more difficult to type than ace@tidbits . com, and because I have good initials, I stick
with them.
Unfortunately, there are a limited number of possible userids, especially at a large site. So
Cornell, for instance, with its thousands of students and staff, has opted for a system of
using initials plus one or more digits (because initials aren't all that unique, either — in
fact, I once asked for my initials as a userid on one of Cornell's mainframes and was told
that ACE was a reserved word in that machine's operating system, though no one could
tell me what it was reserved for).
Microsoft uses yet a different scheme: first name and last initial (using more than one
initial to keep the userids unique). As Microsoft has grown, common names such as
David have been used up, so the company has started other schemes such as first initial
and last name. Why am I telling you this? Because knowing an organization's scheme can
prove useful at times if you're trying to figure out how to send mail to someone at that
organization, and so that I can note a societal quirk. At places like Microsoft where people
use email so heavily, many folks refer to each other by email names exclusively. When my
wife, Tonya, worked at Microsoft, she had a problem with her username, tonyae (first
name and last initial) because it looked more like TonyAe than TonyaE to most people.
The real problem with assigned userids comes when the scheme is ludicrously random.
Some universities work student ID numbers into the userid, for instance, and Compu-
Serve userids are mere strings of digits like 72511,306. 1 believe the scheme has something
to do with octal numbers or some such technoweenie hoo-hah. I don't speak octal or
septal, or any such nonsense, and as a result, I can never remember CompuServe userids.
Remember that email addresses point at an individual, but when you're using services
such as Telnet or FTP, no individual is involved. You simply want to connect to that
machine, and you have to connect saiis userid. This restriction may seem obvious, but it
often trips people up until they get used to it. For example, it seems that you could just
FTP to anonymous@space . alien . com. The system doesn't work that way, though, and
you FTP to space . alien . com, and once there, log in as anonymous. More about FTP in
later chapters.
Punctuation
Enough about userids. What about all this punctuation? Better known as Shift-2 (on U.S.
keyboards anyway), the @ symbol came into use, I imagine, because it's a single character
that generally means "at" in traditional usage. The @ symbol is generally universal for
Internet email, but not all types of networks have always used it. For instance, some
BITNET machines once required you to spell out the word, as in the command TELL
LISTSERV AT BITNIC HELP. Luckily, almost everything uses the @ symbol with no
spaces these days, which reduces four characters to one, and probably has saved untold
person-hours worth of typing over the years.
Part II
Note
110 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
On some European keyboards there is no @ key, but you can still type the character by
pressing ^-Option-1,
As long as you're learning about special characters, look at the dot. It is, of course, the
period character on the keyboard, and it serx^es to separate the domains in the address.
For various reasons unknown to me, the periods have become universally known as dots
in the context of addresses. When you tell someone your email address over the phone,
you say (or rather Td say because it's my address), "My email address is ace at tidbits dot
com." The other person must know that "at" equals the @ symbol and that "dot" equals
the period. If he's unsure, explain yourself.
Alternative Addresses
You may see two other styles of addressing mail on the Internet, both of which work for
sites that aren't actually on the Internet itself. The first, and older, of the two is called bang
addressing. It was born in the early days when there were relatively few machines using
UUCP. Not every machine knew how to reach every other machine, so the trick was to
get the mail out to a machine that knew about a machine that knew about a machine that
knew about your machine. Talk about a friend of a friend! So, you could once have sent
email to an address that looked like uunet 1 nwnexus 1 caladan ! tidbits 1 ace. This ad-
dress would have sent the mail from uunet to nwnexus to caladan to tidbits and finally
to my userid on tidbits. This approach assumes that your machine knows about the
machine uunet (run by the commercial provider UUNET) and that all of the machines in
the middle are up and running. All the exclamation points are called "bangs," appropri-
ately enough, I suppose. On the whole, this style of addressing is slow and unreliable
these days, but if you use a machine that speaks UUCP, you can occasionally use it to
your advantage. For instance, every now and then, I try to send email to a macliine that
my UUCP host, nwnexus -wa . com, for some reason can't reach. By bang-routing the mail
appropriately, I can make another Internet machine try to send the mail out, sometimes
with greater success.
The other sort of special addressing is another way to get around the fact that your
machine, or even your network, isn't connected to the Internet as such. In this case,
you must provide two addresses: one to get to the machine that feeds your machine,
and one to get to your machine. The problem here is that Internet addresses cannot
have more than one @ symbol in them. You can replace the first @ symbol with a
% symbol, and the mailers then try to translate the address properly. My old address,
ace@tidbits . halcyon . com, also could have been ace%tidblts . uucp@halcyon . com.
These tricks are ugly and awkward, but sometimes necessary. Luckily, as the Internet
grows and standardizes, you need fewer and fewer of these addressing tricks.
Enough on machine names and email addresses, then. If you keep the previous discus-
sions in mind when you're using the Internet, you shouldn't be confused by any address
you see. And if you are confused, perhaps that address is seriously malformed. I've seen
it happen before.
Note Note
Chapter 6 ♦ Addressing & URLs 111
URLs
Before I talk about any of the various TCP/IP-based Internet services, I want to explain
URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators. These constitute the most common and efficient
method of telling people about resources available via FTP, the World Wide Web, and
other Internet services. URLs have become so popular that the Library of Congress has
even added a subfield for them when it catalogs electronic resources.
URL generally stands for Uniform Resource Locator, although some people switch "uni-
form" for "universal." Despite what I've heard from one source, 1 have never heard anyone
pronounce URL as "earl;" instead, everyone I've talked to, including one person from CERN
zvho helped develop the World Wide Web, spells out the letters.
What are URLs?
A URL uniquely specifies the location of something on the Internet, using three main bits
of information that you need in order to access any given object. First is the URL scheme,
or the type of server making the object available, be it an FTP, Gopher, or World Wide
Web server. Second, comes the address of the resource. Third and finally, there's the full
pathname or identifier for the object, if necessary.
Don't worry ifl talk about Internet services that you haven't read about in detail yet. That's
what the next feta chapters are for, but I wanted to explain the way that people (including me
in this book) provide pointers to specific resources available via the various services like FTP,
Gopher, and the World Wide Web.
This description is slightly oversimplified, but the point I want to make is that URLs are
an attempt to provide a consistent way to reference objects on the Internet. I say "objects"
because you can specify URLs not only for files and Web pages, but also for stranger
things, such as email addresses, Telnet sessions, and Usenet news postings.
Table 6.1 shows the main URL schemes that you're likely to see.
Part II
Note
112 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Table 6.1
Common URL Schemes
Scheme
Internet Protocol
Sample Client
ftp
File Transfer Protocol
Anarchie
gopher
Gopher protocol
TurboGopher
http
HyperText Transfer Protocol
MacWeb
mailto
Simple Mail Transport Protocol
Eudora
news
Net News Transport Protocol
NewsWatcher
wais
Wide Area Information Servers
MacWAIS
URL Construction
If you see a URL that starts with ftp, you know that the file specified in the rest of the
URL is available via FTP, which means that you could use FTP under Unix, FTP via email,
or a MacTCP-based FTP client such as Anarchie to retrieve it. If the URL starts with
gopher, use TurboGopher or another Gopher client. If it starts with http, use MacWeb,
NCSA Mosaic, or Netscape or some other Web browser. And, finally, if a URL starts with
wais, you can use MacWAIS or another WAIS client.
You can use a Web browser to access most of the URL schemes in Table 6.1, although Web
browsers are not necessarily ideal for anything but information on the World Wide Web
itself Web browsers work pretty well for accessing files on Gopher servers and via gateways
to WAIS databases, but FTP via a Web browser is clutnsy (and may fail entirely with certain
types of files, such as self-extracting archives). Similarly, although it's handy to use mailto
URLs to send mail, I dislike doing so because then I don't have a record of my outgoing mail,
as I do when I send mail from Eudora. And, no Web browser stands up to NewsWatcher in
terms of news capabilities.
After the URL scheme comes a colon (:), which delimits the scheme from what comes
next. If two slashes ( / / ) come next, they indicate that a machine name in the format of
an IP address will follow, such as with http://www.apple.com/ or ftp: //
ftp . info . apple . com/. However, if the URL points at an address in some other format,
such as an email address like mailto:president@whitehouse.gov, the slashes aren't
appropriate and don't appear.
Note
Chapter 6 ♦ Addressing & URLs 113
In some rare circumstances, you may need to use a username and password in an FTP URL
as well. A URL with a username and password might look like this:
ftp : / /username : password@domain . name /pub/
The last part of the URL is the specific information that you're looking for, be it an email
address or more commonly, the path to the directory of the file that you desire. Directory
names are separated from the machine name by a slash (/). You may not have to specify
the path with some URLs if you're only connecting to the top level of the site.
So, for instance, let's dissect a URL that points at the Product Support page on Apple's
Web server:
http: / /wv/w. apple . com/documents/productsupport . html
First off, the http part tells us that we should use a Web browser to access this URL.
Then, www . apple . com is the name of the host machine that's running the Web server.
The next part, / documents /productsupport .html, is the full path to the file the Web
browser shows us, so /documents is a directory, and productsupport . html is the actual
file inside the /documents directory.
If an FTP or Gopher URL ends with a slash, that always means it points at a director)^ and
not a file. If it doesn't end with a slash, it may or may not point at a directory. If it's not
obvious from the last part of the path, there's no good way of telling until you go there.
Thus, this URL points at a directory and will return the directory listing of the files there:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/
However, this URL points directly at a file:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.eom/pub/tidbits/issues/1990/TidBITS#001_16-Apr-90.etx
Because most Web servers enable the creation of a default file that serves in the absence of
a specific file in the URL, it's usually less important for Web users to realize whether or
not they're specifying a file or a directory. In other words.
http : / /\vwv/. tidbits . com/ tidbits/ index . html
points at a file, but the Web server running on that machine will display the same file
(because it's the default), if you simply used this URL:
http://www.tidbits.com/tidbits/
Part II
Note Note
114 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Using URLs
All of these details aside, how do you use URLs? Your mileage may vary, but I use them
in three basic ways. First, if I see them in email or in a Usenet posting, I often copy and
paste the host part into Anarchie (if they are FTP URLs), or I paste the whole thing into
MacWeb or Netscape (if any other scheme). That's the easiest way to retrieve a file or
connect to a site if you have a MacTCP-based Internet connection.
Actually, thanks to some slick programming, all I'd really do is Command-click on the URL
in NexvsWatcher, say, and it would automatically transfer that URL to the appropriate client
program, Anarchie, TurboGopher, MacWeb, or whatever.
Second, if for some reason I don't want to use MacWeb or Netscape (I far prefer Anarchie
for FTP, for instance), sometimes I manually dissect the URL, as we did with the Product
Support page on the Apple Web server, to figure out which program to use and where to
go. This method takes more work, but sometimes pays off in the end. (You can put a
screw in the wall with a hammer, but it's not the best tool for the job.)
Third and finally, whenever I want to point people to a specific Internet resource or file
available for anonymous FTP, I give them a URL. URLs are unambigiious, and although
a bit ugly in running text, easier to use than attempting to spell out what they mean.
Consider the example below:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.eom/pub/tidbits/issues/1995/TidBITS#261_30-Jan-95.etx
To verbally explain the same information contained in that URL, I would have to say
something like: "Using an FTP client program, connect to the anonymous FTP site
ftp.tidbits.com. Change directories into the /pub /tidbits /issues/ 1995/ directory,
and once you're there, retriev^e the file TidBITS#261 /30- Jan-95. etx." A single URL
enables me to avoid such convoluted (and boring) language; and frankly, URLs are in
such common use on the Internet, you may as well get used to seeing them right now.
URLs sometimes have to break between two lines in publications. If you see a two-line URL
that doesn't look quite right, stick the two lines back together when you're typing or pasting
it into a Web broxuser, perhaps without a hyphen that might have been introduced in the
production process.
So, from now on, whenever I mention a file available via FTP or a Web site. I'll use a URL.
If you try to retrieve a file or connect to a Web site and are unsuccessful, chances are
either you've typed the URL slightly wrong, or the file or server no longer exists. It's
Chapter 6 ♦ Addressing & URLs 115
extremely likely that many of the files I give URLs for will have been updated by the time
you read this, so the file name at the end of the URL may have changed.
So if a URL doesn't work, and this is a general piece of good advice, try removing the file
name from the last part of the URL and look in the directory that the original file lived in
for the updated file. If all else fails, you can remove everything after the machine name
and work your way down to the file you are after.
If, after all this, you'd like to learn more about the technical details behind the URL
specifications, check out:
http : / /inf 0 . cern . ch/hypertext /V/VW/Addressing/URL/Overview. html
Weird Characters
There is one rather messy part to URLs that you don't usually have to deal with, but that
comes up on occasion, most commonly in relation to Gopher URLs. There are certain
characters which cannot appear in certain parts of a URL, including spaces. And if one of
those characters would appear, it's replaced with what's called an escape code, consisting
of a percent symbol and the hexadecimal number corresponding to that character.
The reason this comes up most often in relation to Gopher URLs is that Gopher allows
extremely long titles for files and directories, and allows pretty much any character within
them, including spaces, slashes, question marks, and so on. So a Gopher URL may look a
bit like this:
gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu/11/Information%20About%20Gopher
Notice all the %20 escape codes that stand in for what are spaces on the real Gopher menu
title.
For the most part, you don't have to worry about the way the spaces and other characters
(see Table 6.2 for a list of some common ones that will show up in a URL as escape codes)
are translated — I just wanted to show you that this sort of thing happens so you won't be
confused the first time you see a URL with all sorts of what seem like garbage characters
in it.
Table 6.2
Some Reserved Characters in URLs
Character Escape code replacement
%3D
%3B
couthwes
Part II
116 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Table 6.2
continued
Character
Escape code replacement
1
%2F
#
%23
7
%3F
%3A
space
%20
-
%7E
A Self-Addressed Internet. . .
I believe that I promised early on in this book that there would be no quiz, but if I were
going to break my promise, this is probably the chapter I'd do it in. You cannot get
around on the Internet unless you understand how machine names and email addresses
are put together. And, as the World Wide Web continues on its steamroller path to
become the most popular of Internet services, a working knowledge of URLs, no matter
how ugly they may seem to you now, is absolutely essential if you're to understand
where you're going and what you're seeing.
Chapter
Email Basics
Electronic mail is the most pervasive application on the Internet, and for good reason.
What better way to communicate with so many people so quickly? But to use and under-
stand email properly, I must show you how it's constructed, the relevant social mores and
pitfalls, and how you can use it.
What makes up an email message? Most messages have two important parts, with a third
part that doesn't have to appear. The first two parts are the header and the body of the
message, and the third, non-essential part, is the signature. For simplicity's sake, let's work
backward.
Signatures are just about what you'd expect — some text that goes at the bottom of every
message you send; many email programs, including Eudora, which I've included on the
ISKM disk, provide a facility for creating signatures. Most people include their names
(real or pretend) in their signatures; it's considered good form to include your preferred
email address in your signature as well, just in case the address in the header isn't useful
for some reason or another. After you get past the basics of name and email address,
however, you can put anything you like in your signature. Many people lean toward
clever quotations or manage to express some sporting partisanship of their favorite team,
usually with an erudite "Go Weasels '95" or some such. (It's hard to grunt in ASCII.) I
Email Construction
Signature
118 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
prefer clever quotations, especially so if changed once per day — not that I have time or
energy to think them up or type them in every day. Here is a signature that must have
taken some time to create, because all the lines and dashes had to be typed in the right
place:
/ ============= === = = = =====:=== = = === = =:= = = = = = ====: ====: ==== = = = = = = = ==========\
Sorry, a signature
error has occurred.
1 1
1 1
1 1
1 1
11 / " ” \
/=-=-= ===\
/===========\
1 1
1 1
1 1
Ml 1
III 1
1 Resume j
1 Restart |
1 1
1 1
11 \ /
\ /
\--!\ /
1 1
1 1
1 1
1 \
1 1
1 1
y,^,3 = ========:========:==:===:=:= = = = = ===:==:===: = = = = =| \ === === = =========== /
l/\ \
\_\
Courtesy of A. Marsh Gardiner, gardin@harvarda.harvard.edu
Many people also use signatures to disclaim their messages. The signature acts as a
disclaimer, usually stating that the opinions and facts stated in the preceding message
have no relationship to the organization paying for the account or employing the indi-
vidual. Disclaimers are important online because readers have no context in which to take
postings. If Ferdinand the Bull posts a glowing review of specific species of cork tree, for
example, he should also note at the bottom of his review that he is a paid consultant of
Corking Good Times International, and is therefore biased. More common are glowing
reviews from users who "have no relationship with Corking Good Times International,
other than as a satisfied customer." Disclaimers also serve to ensure that no one takes the
words of a single employee as the policy of the entire organization. Marketing depart-
ments hate that. "But Joe said online that Apple was going to give free Macs to everyone
whose birthday falls on the second Tuesday of odd months this year." "Yeah, sure
buddy."
One warning, though. Mailing lists that are published as digests — that is, lists in which a
moderator collects the day's messages and concatenates them into a single file — frown on
or even reject postings with multiple line signatures. This suggestion makes sense, if you
think about it. A large digest file can have 50 messages in it, and if every person has a
four-line signature, the digest suddenly becomes 200 lines longer than necessary. But
enough about signatures, let's look at the meat of the message.
Body
What you put in the body of your letter is your business. I can recommend several
practices, however. First, get in the habit of pressing the Return key twice between
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 119
paragraphs to insert a blank line betw^een them; that additional white space makes email
messages much easier to read. Nothing is harder to read than page after page of unbroken
text.
Actually, something is worse than unbroken text, and that's page after page of unbroken
text in capital letters. DON'T USE ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE
SHOUTING! No one uses all capital letters for long because everyone hates reading it and
will tell you, nicely the first time, to stop.
1 suppose now is a good time to talk about manners in terms of the sorts of things you
should consider when writing email. Email differs from normal mail in many ways. Think
of the difference between a short note to your mother, a memo at work, and a formal
business letter. Most email falls somewhere between the short note and the memo, and
seldom do you ever see an email message with the formality and rigidity of a business
letter. Although I'm giving this information in the context of email, it applies equally as
well to postings on Usenet; so if you like, reread this section, substituting posting for
email everywhere.
How do you start these messages? In many ways, email acts as the great equalizer. Most
of the time, you know someone's name and email address when you send email to him,
nothing more, joeschmoe@alien.com could be a janitor, a summer intern, or the presi-
dent of a Fortune 500 firm. Similarly, any address ending in edu can link to a student,
some member of the staff, a world-renowned professor of underwater basket weaving, or
the president of the university. You have no way of knowing, unless that fact somehow
comes up in conversation.
Most people react to this lack of context by treating everyone with the same level of polite,
but informal, respect. Seldom do people use their titles, so equally seldom do correspon-
dents use those titles in email. Everyone is on a first-name basis. I once took a class with
the astronomer and science advocate Carl Sagan while I was at Cornell, and the first day
of class, an awed undergraduate (but braver than the rest of us) asked, "How should we
address you. Dr. Sagan?" He replied, "You can call me Mr. Sagan, Professor Sagan, Dr.
Sagan, or Herr Doktor Professor Sagan," he paused, "or you can call me Carl." Carl it was
then, and the class benefited greatly from that level of informality, just as the Internet
does.
In light of this knowledge, when I started using email I thought about the differences
between email and paper mail (hereafter called by its true name in the Internet commu-
nity, snail mail). The standard salutation of "Dear" sounds inappropriately formal and
stilted to my ears (apologies to Miss Manners). Since email more closely resembles spoken
communication than written, I opted for the less formal and more colloquial "Hi," which
has served me well. Some people forego the salutation completely, relying solely on the
first name, but that approach feels abrupt to me, as if someone called me on the phone
and stated my name without a "Hello" or so much as a questioning tone. Do what you
like, though; no one has laid down rules on this matter.
Part II
120 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
What you say in the letter itself deserves more thought, however. Because email is so
quick and it's so easy to respond without thinking, many people often reply hastily and
less politely than they would had they taken a moment to consider. Remember, you want
to achieve a certain effect with an email message, just as you do with any form of commu-
nication. If you simply whack your first thoughts into a message, it probably won't
properly convey your true feelings. If you want information from someone, phrasing your
request politely only increases your chances of getting that information, and if you wish
to comment on someone else's words, doing so in a reasoned and level-headed manner
ensures that that person won't immediately consider you a serious jerk.
You also must remember that informal though email may be, it lacks most of the nonver-
bal parts of communication that we seldom consider in normal speech. All inflection,
body language, and facial expressions disappear, and it doesn't help one whit if you make
them while composing the letter. Email is ASCII text only, and only two ways exist to
convey inflections such as sarcasm or irony that would be obvious in spoken conversa-
tion. First, polish your writing skills. There is no substitute for clear and coherent writing.
Many people find writing difficult, but I recommend that you don't think of composing
email as writing, but as speaking to someone who sees your words but cannot see or hear
you. Most people who claim they can't write have little trouble making themselves
understood when speaking.
Second, utilize smileys, or as they are sometimes known, emoticons. Smileys are strings of
punctuation characters meant to be viewed by tilting your head (which is usually easier
than tilting your monitor) to the side. (If they still look wrong, try tilting your head to the
other side.) People have come up with literally hundreds of different smileys, and you can
find lists containing them on the Internet. Seth Godin has even compiled many of them
into a book, The Smiley Dictionary, published by Peachpit Press (and there is at least one
other book, published by O'Reilly & Associates, on the same somewhat silly topic). I take
the view that only two, or maybe three, smileys are at all useful in normal email. The first
is the happy face : - ), which implies that what you just said was meant as humor or at
least shouldn't be taken too seriously. I often use it to imply that I would have said that
bit with a smile. A variant of the happy face uses the semicolon instead of the colon ; - )
and (because of the wink) implies that the preceding sentence was somewhat sarcastic or
ironic. Finally, the frowning face ; - ( implies that you aren't happy about whatever you
just said.
I use smileys relatively heavily in email, where I don't have time to craft each letter as
carefully as I would like. I miss not being able to use them (I could, but no one would
understand) in snail mail occasionally, and I actively try to avoid using them in TidBlTS,
favoring instead words that convey my feelings without the smiley crutch. When in
Note
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 121
doubt, use smileys. If I say in email, ''Well, that was a stupid thing to do," the message is
much more offensive than if I say, "Well, that was a stupid thing to do. : - Believe me, it
is.
I may have given the impression that the Internet is this utopia where everyone always
behaves nicely and ne'er is heard a discouraging word. Unfortunately, that's not so, and
in reality you see plenty of flaming on the nets. Flaming happens when, in a PC discussion
list, you innocently mention that you like your Macintosh, and 17 people immediately
jump on you in email and pummel you within an inch of your electronic life for saying
something so obviously stupid and incorrect when everyone knows that only weenies,
wimps, and little wusses use those toy Macintosh computers, which are good only for
paperweights — and expensive paperweights at that, because you can buy three com-
pletely configured, top-of-the-line Pentium-based PCs for the same price as a used
Macintosh Classic — without a hard drive. And by the way, did 1 mention that your
mother wears combat boots and your father wears ballet slippers? : - )
The preceding paragraph is flaming (except for the smiley, which I threw in to indicate
that I was kidding about your parents' footwear), and if you must respond to an inflam-
matory message, which I don't recommend, do it in email. No one else wants to read your
flames. Think before you lower yourself to flaming; it never solves anything. I have found
in almost every case that replying calmly and clearly embarrasses anyone (assuming that
person is normal and rational, wliich is not always a good assumption) so thoroughly that
she immediately apologizes for being such a jerk. And yes, I know how hard it is not to
just tee off on someone. Restrain yourself and rest assured that everyone who sees your
restraint will think more highly of you for it.
My favorite method of responding to long and vitriolic flames is to send back a single-line
message reading, "You may be right. -Engst." I heard about this technique in an interview
with Tom Brokaw, I think, and it works extremely well, confusing the recipient to no end and
generally putting a stop to the flammg.
Often, people flame companies or large organizations that are doing stupid things.
Various governments are favorite, though slow-moving and not very challenging, targets.
This sort of flaming is more acceptable, although you may start a flame war if other people
don't share your opinions on some major topic, such as whether the Mac is better than
Windows. As a spectator, you may enjoy watching the occasional flame war, as I do, but
again, they never solve anything, and they waste a huge amount of bandwidth (which is
composed of transmission time, people time, and disk storage throughout the world).
Partn
Note Note
122 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Actually, I've decided that in some respects a certain amount of flaming can be positive,
because there are only three ways of ending an argument on the Internet. Agree to disagree,
win your opponent over to your side, or stop from exhaustion. In no case does anyone get
knifed or shot, and if participating in a flame war lets someone blow off some steam, that's
better than their going home and abusing their children. Everything is relative.
Keep in mind that no matter what you say, it may not be private. Always assume that
gobs of people can and do read every message you send. These people include your
coworkers, your system administrator, system administrators on other machines through
which your email travels, random pimply-faced fools who like poking around in other
people's email, and last, but certainly not least, the government, probably in the form of
the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, or National Security Agency. 1 realize this sounds alarming,
and it is most certainly not completely true, but the possibility exists for all of these
people to read your email.
In reality, email carries significant privacy, but because you have no guarantee of that
privacy, you should stay aware of what you're saying. This suggestion is especially true if
you use email at work, where you could lose your job over ill-considered remarks in
email. It's always a good idea to check on your employer's policy about email privacy.
There have been a number of court cases regarding ownership of email (Does it belong to
you? Does it belong to your employer?) at some large companies like Epson and Borland.
Since it may come down to a matter of their lawyers being meaner than your lawyers, don't
push it.
This lack of privacy carries over to mailing lists and Usenet news (where you want people
to read your messages, but you may not want the government to keep tabs on your
postings). In fact, some people have gone so far as to include inflammatory keywords in
otherwise innocuous postings, just to trip up the rumored government computers scan-
ning for terrorists, assassins, space aliens, nudists, vegetarians, people who like broccoli,
and other possible undesirables.
I almost forgot about attachments. Many people like to send each other files in email, and
although you can do this by simply encoding the file as BinHex or uucode (I'll talk about
these file formats in a few chapters) and pasting it into the body of the message, modern
email programs instead enable you to merely attach the file to the message with a specific
command.
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 123
That's all fine and nice if your recipient also uses an email program that knows how to
deal with the attachment, but if not, your friend sees the file, usually encoded in BinHex
or uucode, at the end of the message in the body (but before the signature). Large email
files can be a pain to deal with unless your email program supports attachments.
Header
Okay, I admit it; I've been avoiding talking about the header so far. I did so because the
message header generally looks like a lot of gobbledygook to the novice user, and in fact,
it should. The header exists for the computers, not for the users, and you're lucky that you
can read it as well as you can. In some programs you can see an abbreviated header,
which is good, and in some cases you can ignore the header altogether, which can be a
little dangerous because it may not be clear who receives a reply to that message.
As much as the header is technoweenie information that exists primarily for the comput-
ers to route mail to you, I recommend that you choose an abbreviated header display if
you have one. An abbreviated header shows you information that can be useful, such as
who sent the email to you, when it was sent, what the subject of the message is, and to
whom it was sent (not always only you — it's easy to send the same piece of email to
multiple people).
Take a look at a typical header, culled just now from one of my archived pieces of email
(see figure 7.1).
Figure 7,1
Let's take a spin through all the different parts of the header, explaining each one along
the way and starting with the glop at the top.
Terminal Compromise
From TC.Cornmi I .EDUIbakalmha Hon Jul 19 07:08:08 1993
Received: bg tidbits. com <uR-l.6v2>; Hon. 19 Jui 93 11:04:17 POT
Received: from THEORV . TC . CORNELL . EOU bg nwnexus . wo . com with SMTP id RR 16630
<5 65C/IDR-1.4.4 for <ace8tldbl ts.com> >; Mon, 19 Jul 199308:32:37-0700
Received: from boko. UUCP bg theorg . TC . Come 1 1 EDU with UUCP Id RR02180
<5.65c/IDfi-1.4.4 for ace8lidblts.com>; Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:32:32 -0400
Received; from BRKR <Qf1 2.6) bg boko I thoca . ng . us <UMCP\QM 2.1.3>
id RR05891, Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:32:36 EOT
From TC.Cornel I EOUIbakalaha Mon Jul 19 07:08:08 1993
Received: bg tldblts.com Cufl-1.6v2), Mon, 19 Jul 93 11 04:17 POT
Received; from THE0RV.TC.C0RNELL.EDU bg nwnexus . wa . com with SMTP id flfl 18636
<5.65c/IDfl-1.4.4 for <ace8tldbl ts com> ); Mon, 19 Jul 1993 08:32:37 -0700
Received; from boko. UUCP bg theorg.TC.Cornell.EDU with UUCP id RR02180
<5 65C/IDR-1.4.4 for oce8tldbits.com); Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:32:32 -0400
Received; from BRKR <QM 2.6) bg boka . I thaca . ng . us (UMCP\QM 2. 1.3)
id RR0S691, Mon, 19 Jui 1993 11:32:36 EOT
Messoge-ld: <00192.28269263S6.589l8baka. I thoco.ng.us>
Organization: BRKR Computers Inc.
To; ace8tidbits.com <Rdom C. EngsO,
RIckJSutcl If fe8 faith, tiui.ca <Rlck Sutcliffe)
From: mha8baka . i thaca . ng . us <Mork Rnbinder)
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:08:08 EOT
Subject: Terminal Compromise
Cc ; werner 8rasca I . i cs . u texas . edu ( Uerner Uhr i g )
2:30 PM ijiji ! I ju-; ) ■a
A sample header.
Partn
Note
124 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
From TC.Cornell.EDU I bakalmha Mon Jul 19 07:06:08 1993
Received: by tidbits.com (uA*1.6v2); Mon, 19 Jul 93 11:04:17 PDT
Received: from THEORY.TC.CORNELL.EDU by nwnexus.wa.com with SMTP id AA18636
(5.65C/IDA-1.4.4 for <ace0tidbits.com>) ; Mon, 19 Jul 1993 08:32:37 *0700
Received: from baka.UUCP by theory.TC.Cornell.EDU with UUCP id AA02180
(5.65C/IDA-1 .4.4 for ace0tidbits . com) ; Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:32:32 *0400
Received: from BAKA (QM 2.6) by baka.ithaca.ny.us (UMCPVQM 2.1.3)
id AA05891; Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:32:36 EDT
The preceding lines are merely routing information that tell you where a message went
and when it arrived there. You have to read it backwards to follow the flow, so this
message traveled from the QuickMail server at BAKA Computers to the UMCP Bridge
(baka . ithaca . ny . us), which acts as a gateway for QuickMail messages destined for the
Internet. From there it traveled to Cornell's Theory Center, theory .tc.cornell.edu, and
from the Theory Center, the message bounced almost instantly to nwnexus.wa.com,
which is my Internet host, and then several hours later to my machine, tidbits . com.
You generally can ignore this part of the header, although it can be fun to see where your
message went at times. If your message bounces — that is, if it fails to go through for some
reason and comes back to you — looking at this part in the header helps you determine
how far it got and which machine didn't like it. More about how to handle bounces in a
bit.
Message • Id : <00192 . 2825926356 . 5891 @baka . ithaca . ny . us>
The Message-Id line uniquely identifies each message. It's generally of no use at all, and
although it looks like an email address, it's not.
Only once have I found the Message-Id information useful For some reason, one of my hosts
was duplicating some files that went out, and often the only difference between the messages
was that at a certain point they started having different ids. Unfortunately, I never figured
out how to solve the problem; I just switched to another host.
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 125
Organization: BAKA Computers Inc.
The Organization line identifies the organization of the sender, as you may suspect.
Individuals often have a good time with this line because they don't have real organiza-
tions to put down and can thus include fake organizations like "Our Lady of the Vacant
Lot Enterprises."
To: ace0tidbits.com (Adam C. Engst),
Rick_Sutcliffe0faith.tv/u.ca (Rick Sutcliffe)
The To line can have one or more entries, and it specifies, reasonably enough, who the
mail was sent to. The recipient may not be you because you might be the person men-
tioned in the Cc line or even the Bcc line (which you don't see because Bcc stands for
Blind Carbon Copy). Most of the time you see a name before or after the email address,
but it's not mandatory.
From: mha@baka.ithaca.ny.us (Mark Anbinder)
The From line indicates who sent the email and is self-explanatory.
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 11:08:08 EOT
The Date line lists the date that the email was sent originally, not the time you received it
or read it, and should usually indicate the time zone in which the sender lives. Even then I
find it difficult to keep track of what time it is in other countries. Do you know the local
time in Turkey right now? Some messages use a number, either positive or negative, and
the acronym GMT, which stands for Greenwich Mean Time. Unfortunately, this use
requires that you know what time it is in Greenwich, England, and that you know how
your local daylight savings time is involved. Date lines usually just confuse me.
Part II
Note
126 Internet Starter Kit for Macin tosh
The best way to determine what time it is in another part of the world is to open the Map
control panel click the appropriate spot on the map of the world, and look at the time display,
Fmding the appropriate spot is up to you. I hope you paid attention in geography class in
grade school
Subject: Terminal Compromise
The Subject line should give a clear and concise description of the contents of the email
message. In practice, this description often isn't true, especially after a discussion pro-
ceeds, changing topics occasionally, with everyone using the reply function to keep the
Subject the same. After a while the Subject line bears no resemblance to the contents of the
message, at which point it's time to change the line.
Co: werner(Prascal. ics.utexas.edu (V/erner Uhrig)
The Cc line lists all the people who received copies of the message. There is no functional
difference from being on the To line or the Cc line, but in theory if you receive only a
copy, the message shouldn't concern you as much. In practice I notice little difference.
An abbreviated header probably just shows these five lines and avoids displaying the
routing information at the top of the header.
You also may see other lines in the header that identify which program mailed the
message, to whom the recipients should reply, the type of data included in the message,
how the data is encoded, and that sort of thing. In general, you don't have to worry about
anything in the header very much, but it's worth taking a look every now and then to see
if you can tell what's going on in there.
Bounces
In a perfect world, all email would get through to its destination quickly and reliably. But
just as with snail mail, which can take one to five days to appear, and which sometimes
never appears at all, email isn't perfect, and sometimes it will bounce back to you. At
times the machine that bounced the mail back to you will give you a hint as to what went
wrong, but more often you're on your own.
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Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 127
The most common reason for a bounced message is a typo somewhere in the address.
That's one reason that short email addresses are good — they're easier to type and thus
less likely to be mistyped. The first thing to do when you get a bounce is to look through
the header of the original message (the full headers are usually returned to you) and make
sure you typed the address properly. Ever)'one makes this mistake on occasion.
A common error message in bounced email is "User unknown." This means that the
email arrived at the proper machine, which searched through its list of users and decided
that it didn't have a user with the name that you used. Again, this is most commonly due
to a typo in the userid, although sometimes there are problems on the destination ma-
chine that have caused it to forget about a user, possibly temporarily. After checking the
address, try resending the message, especially if you've gotten mail through to that
address before.
Along with unknown users, you may see error messages complaining about "Host
unknown." This is a more serious error that's more difficult to work around if it's not
simply a typo. The basic problem is that for some reason one machine, perhaps your host
machine or perhaps one further along in the path to the destination, was unable to contact
the destination machine. There's not much you can do in this case other than try again a
little later, in the hope that the machine you're mailing to has come back up.
One thing to watch out for is that sometimes the header provides an incorrect address to
your email program, but the person includes the proper one in their signature. If you have
trouble replying to a message, and the address you're replying to is different from an
address listed in the signature, tiy^ using the signature address instead.
I find this trick especially useful if the address in the signature is simple, whereas the address
from the header is long and convoluted. Simple addresses seem to be more reliable, on the
zohole, although that's not a hard and fast rule.
Using Email Programs
All email programs share some basic features that you need in order to quickly and
efficiently read, reply, and store your email. However, after these basic commonalities, the
differences between programs mount quickly, so I concentrate on those differences when
I talk about each program later in the book. For the moment, though, let's look at what an
email program must do at a minimum.
Reading Email
An email program should enable you to display and scroll through an email message
easily. Because you're using the Macintosh, you should be able to do all the standard
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128 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Macintosh things to text in a window, such as copying and pasting into a different
program, resizing the window to display more text, selecting all the text with a single
command, and that sort of thing.
Although you usually can choose the font and size in which you view messages in
Macintosh email programs, I recommend that you stick to a monospaced font such as
Monaco or Courier. People on the Internet must format tables and graphics with spaces,
and monospaced fonts such as Monaco and Courier display these tables and graphics
properly. Proportionally spaced fonts such as Times and Helvetica don't work as well
because the characters in these fonts can have different widths, with a lowercase i being
thinner than an uppercase W. Few of these features are generally available with a Unix
mail program; that's one of the major advantages of using the Mac.
Some email or communications programs come with special monospaced fonts that are
supposedly easier to read than the standard Monaco and Courier. If you see fonts like
TTYFont, VTIOO, or Mishaioaka, they're designed for displaying Internet email on the
screen. I personally prefer Monaco 9 point.
Navigating and Managing Email
Another important feature of an email program is the manner in which it enables you to
move between messages, save messages in different mailboxes, and delete unwanted
messages after you've read them. Most email programs display a list of the messages in
an In Box area, and some indicate which messages you have already read, replied to, or
saved to disk. Opening a message usually opens a new window to display the message,
and sometimes closing the window (with or without deleting the current message) opens
the next unread message — a nice feature for those who receive a great deal of mail. Being
able to sort the list of messages is useful, and you should be able to select multiple mes-
sages at once to move them to another mailbox or delete them.
Some of these navigation features may not exist in the email program you use, but with a
macro program like CE Software's QuicKe}/s, you may be able to simulate them.
Speaking of multiple mailboxes, all email programs should support them, though unfor-
tunately not all do. Most people want to save some of the messages they receive, so a
program should allow you to create your own mailboxes for filing away messages on
different topics. Of course, if you can create a new mailbox, the email program should
enable you to do everything you can do in your In Box to the messages stored in a per-
sonal mailbox.
Note
Chapter 7 ♦ Einail Basics 129
Perhaps the worst, and most surprising, offender in the multiple mailbox world is Apple's
PowerTalk (released in late 1993), which puts a single mailbox on your Mac's desktop, but
loses mail-related information like sender, subject, and date if you copy the messages out of
the mailbox to a folder.
While you're managing your email, you will undoubtedly want to delete many of the
messages you receive. This area may seem straightforward, but the better email programs
follow Apple's lead with the Finder and enable you to trash a file without actually imme-
diately deleting it. The easier it is to delete a message (and it should be very easy since
you're likely to eventually want to delete most of the mail you receive), the more likely
you will eventually delete something accidentally. If the email program deletes immedi-
ately, your message is toast. The other advantage of the tr^^o-stage (where a message is put
in a trash can before being deleted later) or a delayed delete (where a message is marked
as being deleted but isn't actually deleted until you close the mailbox) is that you then
don't have to put up with an annoying confirmation dialog box every time you delete a
message.
Some of your messages may, in fact, contain programs or other files that you want to save
to a normal Macintosh file. A few email programs automatically detect attachments
encoded in certain formats (more about file formats later) and decode such messages on
their own. But one way or another, you need a simple way to save the message you're
looking at without copying and pasting the entire thing into a word processor.
Replying to Email
Much of the mail you receive requires a reply of some sort, so an email program should
make replying extremely easy, either with a command key shortcut or a single click on an
icon. An email program also should facilitate quoting the original message, or prefixing
each line with one or two special characters, usually a greater-than symbol and a space.
Using quoting, you can easily include some of the message you're replying to so that the
recipient has some context to know what you're talking about. A nice feature is the ability
to select just a certain part of the original message and have the email program quote only
that selected text in the reply and ignore the rest of the original message (see figure 7.2).
Quoted lent i®L:
Original text
k
Ueinberg's Second Lav: If builders built buildings the vag progranners
vrote programs, the first woodpecker to cone along would destroy
ciui 1 ization
Quoted text
> Ueinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the vag prograeners
> wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy
> ciui 1 izotion.
u
¥
2:34 PM ^ "’Hn ^ [«
Figure 72 Original text and quoted text.
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130 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Rick Holzgrafe has written a clever little $10 shareware utility called SignatureQiiote that
enables you to quote messages properly even if your email program doesn't support it.
SignatureQiiote supports two quoting styles, two signatures that you can paste in, and can
join and split text. It's a must-have if you're locked into a lousy email program. It's in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Because an email message may have originally been sent to several people, an email
program should give you the option of replying only to the sender or to all the people to
whom the message was originally sent. At the same time, it ideally should make sure that
you see the salient lines in the header. I've spawned a couple of embarrassing scenes by
forwarding a message to a friend, and when my friend replied to me, his email program
saw that mine had included the original message's address in the Reply-To line in the
header. So his reply, instead of going just to me, went back to the sender, which was a
mailing list that went to thousands of people. Oops! Luckily, I didn't say anything embar-
rassing and neither did he, so we were safe, but that's a good example of how two com-
puter professionals who know better could have been thoroughly embarrassed in public.
Think of this situation as standing up in a crowded restaurant and shouting loudly that
your underwear has holes. You get the idea.
More powerful email programs provide features that can automatically mark or reply to
email based on the contents of the header or the body of the incoming message. They
often generalize these features so that you can essentially run a rnailserver, which sends
out requested information automatically via email. You also can use this sort of feature to
run a simple mailing list, which takes a message to a certain local address and forwards it
automatically to a list of subscribers.
There are several programs that enable you run your own mailing list from a Macintosh and
do things like auto-replies, although they currently require a direct connection to the
Internet. Look for MailShare and AutoSharc in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
New Email
When replying to email and when creating new mail, an email program should provide
all the features that you're used to when you're writing in a Macintosh word processor. In
my opinion (which is by no means universal), the standard editors in the character-based
Unix world stink (yeah, I know those are fighting words), and I spend so much time
Note
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 131
writing and editing my email that I couldn't possibly put up with anything other than a
decent Macintosh editor. However, because every email program implements text entry
and editing on its own, none of them compare to a full-fledged word processor, and a few
barely even compete with the free TeachText or its fancier successor, SimpleText. My
dream, which isn't all that far off, is to be able to use Nisus Writer, the word processor
with which I'm writing this book, for all of my email. With the growing acceptance of
Apple events, this change will happen. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.
I may be odd in this respect, but I think that any email program should make it easy to
save a copy of everything you write, preferably automatically. I send more email than
most people, often as many as 1,000 messages per month, but I like to be able to go back
on occasion and see what I said, forward a message to someone who lost it, or just browse
through the thoughts that appeared in my writings at that time. Why bother to keep a
diary if you're writing about most of what happens in your life in email to friends?
Finally, whenever you create email, your email program should enable you to send the
mail to a nickname or alias, which is merely another, easier-to-remember form of an email
address. So instead of typing ferdinand-the-bull@cork-tree.com every time you want
to send that person email, you can type the shorter Bull. Be careful with nicknames
because it's easy to create more than you can easily remember, at which point they don't
particularly help any more. Defining nicknames for everyone you might ever send email
to is a waste of time; settle for defining a nickname only after you decide that you are
likely to send that person email frequently.
You want to be slightly careful with nicknames, because occasionally the recipient sees the
nickname as well r?s the address, A friend once created a nickname DA BOSS for our
supervisor, loho thought it was funny when she saw it. I could think of some less humorous
situations.
Finding People
Now you know how an email program should work and how to read email addresses
when you see them littering up this book and the nets in general. But how do you find
people to write to? Finding people to write to depends on what you're looking for. Hmm?
What does he mean by that?
Assume that there are two types of people — those you already know and those you
haven't yet met. The latter group makes up most of the world, and in some respects, they
are the easiest to find and talk to because you don't really care who specifically you end
up talking to. After all, you don't know any more about one stranger over another, so
who you talk to makes no difference.
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132 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Friends
When I first started using the networks way back when, few of my friends had accounts,
and of them, only my best friend from high school ever managed to send me email more
than once. I think I got a total of three messages from him. I tried to convince them, but I
just couldn't get my friends to use email. Finally, I decided they all truly hated me (a
logical conclusion for a 17-year-old college freshman) and gave up on them. My ego has
recovered some since then, because I've found that convincing people to start using email
just to talk to me is almost impossible. This argument worked with my parents, after a
while, especially after my sister also started using email heavily at Cornell. But otherwise?
I can't think of a single person whom I've convinced to use email for my sake, although
we recently managed to set my grandmother up with an old Macintosh Classic and an
email account. The moral of the story is that you should assume that you can talk only to
people who already use email.
Okay, so once past that reality check, how do you find the address of someone who you
know uses email? The simplest and most effective method seldom occurs to many net
denizens — use the telephone and ask them. This method, low-tech though it may be, has
the advantage of being quick, accurate, and easy. Of course, it does ruin the surprise value
of that first email note. Such is life. You do need to know your friend's telephone number,
or failing that, her address so you can call the all-knowing information computers at the
phone company. If you don't even know where your friend lives, she may be trying to
hide from you anyway after that ugly incident a while back.
"Aha!" you say, "If the all-knowing phone company computers can give me my friend's
telephone number, aren't there all-knowing computers on the Internet that can give me
my friend's email address?" Nice try, and good question, but the answer is, unfortu-
nately, maybe. Some computers know what users they support, and you can find some
information via services called Finger, Wlwis, X.500, Ph, Knowbot, and various others, but
that information doesn't help unless you already know what machine to search. Several
attempts have been made at linking various directory services on different machines, but
I've never found them to be the slightest bit useful. The problem is twofold. First, hooking
a local directory of users to an Internet-wide directory requires some effort and certain
standards, and inertia being what it is, that effort isn't always made, and the standards
don't exist. Second, many organizations shield their users from the outside world for
reasons of security and privacy. These shields also make it difficult to determine how
many people actually use the Internet because one domain may have two users, like
tidbits . com, or memy thousands of users, like microsof t . com.
Frankly, because I find these services so completely useless, Vm not going to bother to discuss
them further. That said, if you crave some frustration, go to the University of Minnesota's
Gopher server at gopher , tc . umn . edu ( the Home Gopher server by default, if you use
TurboGopher), select Phone Books, and then checkout the various different options available
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 133
for searching for Internet email addresses. If you knoxv the organization in question, and they
have a Phone Book server, that's the best start— otherwise you're on your own. The main
thing you miss via the Gopher route is the Knowbot Information Service. To access it, telnet
to info, cnri . reston .va.us 185 and type help to see the possible commands.
Acquaintances
As I said earlier in this chapter, finding new friends is easy on the Internet. You don't
know people beforehand, so communicating with them in a discussion list via email or
news requires nothing in terms of opening lines or trivial small talk about the fallibility of
weather forecasters. If you have something to contribute to a discussion, or perhaps if you
merely want to make a private comment to one of the people in the discussion, meeting
him is as easy as replying to his message. Whether that first contact grows beyond a one-
time message depends on many variables, but with so many people, finding correspon-
dents on the net doesn't take long.
As much as meeting people may be easy, finding them again after some time often proves
more difficult. You may not remember where a person lives, if you ever knew, and if it's
in the United States at all, you probably don't know his telephone number; and frankly,
you may not even remember how to spell his name. And yet, all too often I've had long,
involved conversations that eventually trail off after several weeks or months, and then I
don't hear from that person again. If I haven't saved a message (which contains the all-
important email address in the header) or recorded his email address somewhere, I have
to hope that my friend has better organizational systems than I do.
I suggest that you figure out some way to keep track of your correspondents' email
addresses. Nickname features work well although they may prove unwieldy as a storage
mechanism later on. If that's true, I recommend using a standard database or address
book program that can handle extra fields for email addresses. This advice may sound
obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've lost an address that I wanted several
months later. These days I keep a copy of every piece of email I send, in part so I can
search that file, large though it may be, for email addresses that have escaped my short-
term memory.
Mailing Lists
There's no accounting for taste, and similarly, there's no accounting for different interests.
I may be interested in electronic publishing, tropical fish, and competitive distance
running, whereas the next person might favor The Simpsons, aviation, and Irish culture. As
a result, discussion groups have sprung up around almost every imaginable topic, and if
your area of interest isn't represented, it's not too difficult to start your own group. These
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134 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
groups take two forms: mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. I talk more about Usenet in
the next chapter; for now I'll concentrate on mailing lists.
The beauty of mailing lists is that they cover specific topics and they come straight to you,
without any extra work on your part. If you find yourself interested in a topic, you can
subscribe to the appropriate mailing list, and all the traffic comes directly to your elec-
tronic mailbox. This system makes participating in many mailing lists easy, even if you
have only email access to the Internet; Usenet access may require more money and effort.
Luckily for those of you who cannot get Usenet access, many mailing lists and
newsgroups mirror each other.
Mailing lists have several other advantages over Usenet news. Email is ubiquitous on the
Internet, whereas access to news is less common (although certainly widespread). Because
of the way Usenet news propagates throughout the nets, mailing lists often arrive faster
than any given posting in a newsgroup. Because mailing lists arrive in your electronic
mailbox, they may seem less intimidating than large newsgroups with many participants.
And frankly, many of us who lead busy lives find mailing lists easier to keep up with
because we don't have to run another program to read the list, whereas reading news
always requires leaving that ubiquitous email program and then running a newsreader.
There are a number of programs that operate mailing lists, the most well-known of which
are LISTSERV, ListProcessor (also known as listproc), and Majordomo. They all support
similar commands; I'll get into those in a moment. LISTSERV is a commercial program
from Eric Thomas of LSoft. It currently requires an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS
(although versions for VMS, Unix, and Windows NT are in the works). The Unix-based
ListProcessor comes from Anastasios Kotsikonas and is now owned by CREN (remember
them from chapter 4?). The Unix-based Majordomo is free as far as I can tell.
There also are many mailing lists that are run through hacks to the Unix mailer soft-
ware — these generally require some sort of human intervention for subscribing and
signing off, although sometimes they use non-standard commands that do the same
thing. Have I mentioned yet that I dislike programs that don't work in standard ways?
They make life even more confusing than it already is.
You may zvonder luhy LISTSERV doesn't have an E at the end and zvhy it is spelled zoith all
capitals. LISTSERV softzvare has existed for some time on IBM mainframes that run the
VMICMS operating system. This operating system Ihnits userids to eight characters (hence
the missing E), and because the operating system itself zoos orighmlly not case sensitive, all
commands and program names haz)e traditionally been typed in uppercase only. The name
also may have had something to do with early computer terminals not supporting lozvercase,
hut I can't prove that theoiy. Just believe me— by convention, LISTSERVs are always
addressed in the uppercase, although it doesn't ^natter any more.
Note
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 135
Along with the different mailing list manager programs, you may have to deal with two
other variables related to mailing lists — moderation and digests. Each of these possibili-
ties slightly changes how you interact with the list, so let's look at each in turn and then
go over the basics of using the list manager software as a subscriber.
Moderated vs. Unmoderated
1 suspect many mailing lists started out uumoderated, which means that anyone was able to
send a message on any topic (whether or not it was appropriate to the group) to the list.
The list software then distributed that message to the entire list. You see the problem
already — no one wants to read a bunch of messages that have nothing to do with the topic
or discussion at hand. Similarly, if a discussion is spinning out of control and turning into
a flame war, it's just a waste of time for many people.
Thus was bom the concept of the moderated mailing list. To stem inappropriate postings,
a moderator reads all the postings before they go out to the group at large and decides
which are appropriate. Moderated groups tend to have less traffic, and the messages that
go through are guaranteed by the moderator to have some worth. This system is good.
The Info-Mac Digest is a prominent example of a moderated group in the Macintosh world.
Although they're usually fairly lenient, moderators Bill Lipa, Gordon Watts, Igor Livshits,
and Liam Breck do an excellent job, and their efforts are much appreciated by all I help out
somewhat with Info-Mac, although with the files stored on the Info-Mac Archive, not with
the Info-Mac Digest itself
On the downside, moderated groups occasionally run into sticky issues of censorship
because the moderator may not always represent the views of the majority of the readers.
Moderator positions are volunteer only; I've never heard of a mailing list that elected a
moderator, although it's certainly possible, particularly among lists that carry traffic
associated with a professional organization.
There's a slightly different form of moderation practiced on some other lists that you may
be interested in, such as the Apple Internet Users and Apple Internet Providers lists. Run
by Chuq von Rospach of Apple, these lists employ a "List Mom" form of moderation,
which means that although all postings appear whether or not Chuq approves, he re-
serves the right to tell people to take off-topic discussions elsewhere. Since I was about to
start similar lists when Chuq created the Apple Internet Users and Providers lists, I
volunteered to be an Assistant List Mom on Chuq's lists, which means I help steer the
discussions so that they stay on track. Needless to say, I recommend both lists highly for
discussions about the Mac and the Internet.
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136 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
To subscribe to the lists, send email to listproc&abs. apple .com and in the body of the
message (the Subject line can be blank or nonsense), piU subscribe apple-internet-users
Your Full Name or subscribe apple-intemet-providers Your Full Name.
Once your subscription has been processed, you will receive an informational file from the
list, and then you can start posting questions and helping out with answers that you know.
You cannot post to the list until you have subscribed.
I see no reason to choose to read or not read a mailing list based on its moderation until
you've spent a while seeing what goes on in the group. I subscribe to various lists, some
moderated, some not, and on the whole, both have their place. Keep in mind, though, that
if you post to a moderated list, the moderator may reject your posting. Don't feel bad, but
do ask why so that your future submissions stand a better chance of reaching the rest of
the group. On the other hand, when posting to an unmoderated group, try to stick to
appropriate topics because people hate hearing about how you like your new car in a list
devoted to potbellied pigs. Too many misdirected postings to a list may agitate list
members to the point of asking for a moderator to limit the discussion.
Individual Messages vs. Digests
When the number of messages in a mailing list increases to a certain level, many lists
consider creating a digest version of the list. A digest is simply a single message that
contains all the individual messages concatenated in a specific way. Why bother with a
digest? Depending on how your email program works, you might find it awkward to
receive and read as many as 30 messages a day, especially if your email service, such as
AppleLink, charges you a per-message fee to receive email. Just think how many mes-
sages you may have waiting after a week of vacation. If the messages are sent in digest
form, a mailing list becomes easier to handle for some people because you get one big
message instead of lots of little messages.
Unfortunately, digests have problems too. Some email gateways to commercial services
(again AppleLink) limit the size of incoming email messages. Thus, digest mailing lists
like the Info-Mac Digest, one of the most popular Macintosh mailing lists, can range in
size from 30K to over lOOK, so very few issues of the digest sneak through the gateways
with size limitations. In addition, you may find it easier to read (or skip through) small
individual messages, whereas scrolling through a lOOK file can take quite a bit of time and
can be extremely awkward with some email programs. To add to the complication,
certain email programs can break up a digest into its individual messages for easier
viewing. I'm talking the email equivalent of digestive enzymes here.
You must decide for yourself whether a digest is easier or harder to work with, but only
with some groups do you have any choice. The LISTSERV and ListProcessor software
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 137
sometimes provide an option that you can set to switch your subscription to a mailing list
from individual messages to a single, usually daily, digest. I don't believe you can toggle
this option for Majordomo-based lists, but Majordomo list administrators can set up a
separate list that sends out a digest — you would simply subscribe to the separate (digest)
list instead. These separate digest lists in Majordomo generally have "-digest" appended
to the listname.
Mailing List Managers
Mailing list managers sport many sophisticated features for managing large mailing lists,
and these features have made the programs popular among the people who start and run
mailing lists (you didn't think lists just worked on their own, did you?). For instance, you
can easily and automatically subscribe to and sign off from mailing lists run with a
mailing list manager without bothering a human (in most cases). This significantly
reduces the amount of work that the list administrator has to do. These programs gener-
ally also have provisions for tracking the subscribers to a list, and for those who want to
remain unknown, concealing certain subscriptions.
Mailing list managers can prevent unauthorized people from sending messages to the list.
The TidBlTS list works this way in theory because only I can send a message, in this case
an issue of TidBlTS, to the list. I say "in theory" because in practice the safeguards have
broken down twice, resulting in confusing messages going to the entire list. The
LISTSERV that runs the TidBlTS list also knows to route all replies to postings on the list
to me directly, which is normally good, but when these two accidental postings got
through the safeguards, I received hundreds of messages from confused readers who
didn't know why they had gotten this message. It was a major hassle.
The LISTSERV software knows about other LISTSERVs running on other machines
around the world and uses this knowledge to limit network traffic. For instance, I send a
single message from my machine to a mainframe at Rice University in Texas that runs the
LISTSERV handling the TidBlTS list. Once the message arrives at Rice, the LISTSERV
software checks to make sure it came from me and then sends it out to the many thou-
sands of readers on the TidBlTS subscription list.
The LISTSERV is smart, however. It doesn't blindly send out thousands of messages, one
per user, because that would waste network bandwidth, especially on expensive trans-
oceanic links. Instead, the LISTSERV determines how to enlist the help of certain other
LISTSERVs running around the world. If it knows of a LISTSERV site in Australia, for
instance, it sends a single copy of the message to Australia along with the list of Austra-
lian readers to distribute to. If 100 people in Australia subscribe to the TidBlTS list, only
one message crosses the Pacific instead of 100 identical copies of the same message. That's
elegant.
I gather that ListProcessor and Majordomo, Unix mail-based mailing list managers, don't
have as many features as the LISTSERV software, but that's more from an administrator's
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138 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
point of view. Users generally shouldn't care which they use. Don't worry about it one
way or another; you have no choice when picking mailing lists to subscribe to. And
despite the added features of the LISTSERV software, the thing that makes the adminis-
trative details of a list easy to deal with is the administrator, not the software.
ListProcessor used to be called Llnix-Listserv and was distributed freely (version 6,0c is still
free, even now that CREN has bought it and will be selling future versions), but after some
unpleasantness regarding the term "Listserv," Anastasios Kotsikonas decided to rename it to
avoid confusion. So, if you see references to Unix-Listserv, they're talking about
ListProcessor,
Using LISTSERVs
Most people find dealing with LISTSERVs quite easy; however, you should watch out for
a few common pitfalls while working with LISTSERV-based mailing lists. Many of the
following commands and pitfalls apply to lists run by the other mailing list managers as
well, so it's worth reading through the LISTSERV section even if, for instance, you're
dealing with a ListProcessor list.
Every LISTSERV list has two email addresses associated with it: the address for the
LISTSERV itself, and the address for the mailing list. Why the dichotomy? Well, the
LISTSERV address handles all the commands, things such as subscriptions and requests
for lists of subscribers and the like. The mailing list address is where you send submis-
sions to the list, assuming of course that it's that sort of list. Here, I use the TidBITS list as
an example for my illustrations of the basic tasks you do with a LISTSERV-based mailing
list. (The only difference between the TidBITS list and many others is that if you send mail
to the mailing list address, it doesn't go to everyone else on the list because the TidBITS
list is dedicated to distributing TidBITS, not to discussion, as are most lists. Any mail sent
to the mailing list address comes to me, which is fine, because such messages are usually
comments on articles.)
If you want to send the LISTSERV that handles the TidBITS list a command, such as your
subscription request, send it to listserv@ricevm1 . rice . edu. Notice that nowhere in the
address is TidBITS mentioned, which is a hint that you have to specify TidBITS some-
where else. LISTSERVs ignore the Subject line entirely, so don't worry about filling it in at
all. In the body of the message, though, you can put one or more commands, each on its
own line.
To subscribe to the TidBITS list, you send the preceding address a message with the
following command on one line in the body of the message: SUBSCRIBE TIDBITS your
full name, where you replace your full name with your real name, not your email address
or some cute nickname. If the list administrator has to contact you about a problem, she
Note
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 139
probably doesn't appreciate having to address you as "Dear Swedish Chef Fan Club Ork
Ork Ork." To clarify the preceding command, to subscribe to any LISTSERV mailing list,
you send the SUBSCRIBE command, a space, the name of the list you want to subscribe
to, a space, and then your full name, which must be at least two words (see figure 7.3).
1 don't know how rock star types like Cher or Prince manage with LISTSERVs, although I
did once get mail from someone who really only had one name. I advised him to use "No
really, I only have one name" as his last name.
Figure 7.3 Subscribing to TidBITS.
Prince has legally changed his name to a single character that looks like a little stick figure
person. Such characters are called dingbats in the publishing world, so I vote that we simply
refer to Prmce as Dmgbat, or perhaps Prince Dingbat to be unambiguous. Needless to say,
there's no way to subscribe to a mailing list using a single non-alphabetic character as your
name.
The LISTSERV always returns a w^elcome note after you have subscribed successfully.
Keep that note! It lists various useful commands, such as how to sign off from the list, and
it usually provides the address of the list administrator. You can contact the list adminis-
trator to handle any problems that the automated program chokes on.
You know what I just said about keeping the welcome message from the LISTSERV. Well,
I really mean it! I can't tell you how irritating it is to have someone post the list asking
how to signoff when it would have been trivial if they'd just kept that welcome message.
Actually, I can tell you how irritating this is, because after the 10th or 100th person does,
it's tremendously exasperating! Sorry, I'll quiet down now.
After you have subscribed to a list, you mainly want to read messages (which is easy) and
post occasional messages to the rest of the people on the list. Once again, to post a mes-
sage you send it to the mailing list address, which is always the name of the list at the
same machine. If, for example, you want to send mail to the TidBITS list (which comes
only to me), you send the email to tidbits@ricevm1 .rice.edu. I realize I've almost
beaten this particular horse to death, but I can't emphasize enough the difference between
the LISTSERV address and the mailing list address. You send commands to the
LISTSERV, and submissions to the mailing list address. Perhaps the most common
problem I see on LISTSERV mailing lists is that people forget to send commands to the
Part II
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140 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
LISTSERV address and instead fill up the mailing list with the electronic equivalent of
junk mail that no one wants to see. And, of course, sending commands to the mailing list
address isn't just annoying and flame-provoking, it's futile because the LISTSERV doesn't
respond to them there.
After you've been on a list for some time, the LISTSERV may ask you to confirm your
subscription. I set this option with the TidBJTS list to clean the deadwood from the list
every year. Students graduate, employees move on, bulletin boards close up, and those
addresses don't always go away, so the LISTSERV wastes network resources sending to a
non-existent person. It's much like talking to a politician. After you have received TidBITS
for a year from the LISTSERV, it sends you a message asking you to confirm that you still
want to get the newsletter. If you don't respond within seven days, the LISTSERV re-
moves you from the list, assuming that you don't want to continue receiving email from
it. If you respond, you must respond with a command so that you send it to the
LISTSERV address, not the mailing list address. The command is simply CONFIRM
TIDBITS (or the name of whatever list you are asked to confirm).
A portion of the time this confirmation process fails. As I'm sure you noticed in the
preceding paragraphs, nowhere do you provide your email address to the LISTSERV,
which is supposed to determine it from the header of your message. This idea seems
excellent at first because the header should, in theory, have your email address correct,
and it doesn't suffer from typos or simple human mistakes that you make if you type it in
by hand. However, depending on the routing that your mail takes and how you or your
system administrators have your system set up, your address as it appears in the header
may change from time to time. Those changes play havoc with the LISTSERV, which is a
very literal program. Therefore, when you confirm a subscription, if that confirmation
comes from an address the LISTSERV doesn't recognize, poof, it doesn't work. You
probably still receive mail to the original address just fine because the address is usually
merely a variant on the theme, so many people sit helplessly by as the LISTERV asks for
confirmation, rejects it, and then calmly deletes them from the list.
Jins situation is a perfect example of why computers should never be given direct control
over human lives. If you don't properly match for some reason, you're just another file to be
deleted.
There is a simple fix. Just resubscribe as soon as the LISTSERV sends either the confirma-
tion rejection or the message saying that it has deleted you from the list. You may get
duplicates of everything for a few days, but then the LISTSERV deletes your old address
and continues to send to your new one.
If you blow it and misspell your name while subscribing, or perhaps decide to change
your name for one reason or another, you can always change your name (only) with the
Note
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 141
LISTSERV by sending another SUBSCRIBE command. The danger here, as discussed in
the preceding paragraphs, is that if your address looks at all different from when you
originally subscribed, the LISTSERV happily adds you to the list again, and you receive
duplicates of everything. Now is a good time to ask the list administrator for help because
the LISTSERV recognizes only your new address, so you can't delete your old address. Bit
of a Catch-22 there.
This Catch-22 can apply to trying to sign off from a list normally, as well. Under standard
circumstances, if you send the command SIGNOFF TIDBITS to the LISTSERV address, it
removes you from the list. If your address in the header has changed, however, it doesn't
recognize you as a current subscriber and thus doesn't let you sign off. Once again, if you
need help beyond what the LISTSERV program can provide, don't hesitate to ask the list
administrator, but ask nicely. These people don't get paid to take abuse, and in fact, they
don't get paid to administrate a list at all. I'll tell you how to contact a list administrator in
a moment.
The reason for this seemingly irritating address feature is that administrators realized
early on that it would be way too much fun to sign someone else up for mailing lists if
you really don't like him. You could, for example, sign him up for all the special offers in
the back of The National Enquirer. Some friends of mine once had a war with that game,
but one was declared the loser when he received bronzed baby shoes and a free subscrip-
tion to a white supremacist newsletter, or some such nonsense. I'm sure it would be great
fun to sign Bill Gates up for a really far-out mailing list, but it gets old after a while and is
generally considered abuse of the netw^orks.
Some LISTSERVs can send you files if you send them proper commands in a message. The
LISTSERV at Rice, listserv(^ricevni1 . rice.edu, is one of these sites. In fact, it stores
Macintosh files that also exist on the popular FTP site sumex-aim. Stanford, edu. You
can find site-specific information by sending a HELP command to any LISTSERV, and for
the standard LISTSERV information, send INFO REFCARD.
LISTSERVs support a number of other commands, of which only a few are generally
useful. If you want to see a list of all the people who have subscribed to a LISTSERV list,
you can use the REVIEW command, although many lists no longer return the full list of
subscribers to protect against abuses.
The other utility of the REVIEW command is that it includes the address of the list
administrator at the top, so it's a good way to find out who to ask for help. Using the
REVIEW command is a good way to see what address the LISTSERV thinks you used to
subscribe and then ask the administrator for help. For just the administrator address, you
can change the command to REVIEW SHORT.
Part II
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142
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Budding direct marketers should be aware that if you request a bunch of subscriber lists arid
use them for nefarious marketing purposes, the following will occur: (a) that feature will be
immediately turned off, and (b) I will personally lead the flamethrower crews on a mission to
turn you into a fine electronic ash. That sort of opportunism doesn't fly on the Internet.
To switch a LISTSERV subscription (you must already be subscribed) from individual
messages to a digest format, send the LISTSERV address the command SET listname
DIGEST. To switch back to individual messages, send it command SET listname MAIL.
Most of the other commands that LISTSERVs support aren't as interesting, or as much fun
to write about, so I'll refrain and let you find them on your own.
Using ListProcessor
Working with a mailing list run by the ListProcessor program is remarkably like working
with a mailing list run by the LISTSERV program. The similarity isn't coincidental —
ListProcessor started out as a clone of LISTSERV, not in terms of the code, but in terms of
the command structure. Thus, the few differences between the two are minimal, espe-
cially in the basic functions.
Just as LISTSERVs have a listserv@domain.name address, ListProcessors are generally
referred to as listproc@domain . name, although a number of them may still use the
listserv@domain . name address left over from when ListProcessor was called Unix-
Listserv. And just as the mailing list itself has a different address from the LISTSERV
address, something like listname@domain.name, so too do ListProcessor lists. In other
w'ords, the confusing dichotomy between the ListProcessor address and the list address
exists, just as it does with LISTSERV lists. You send commands to the ListProcessor
address (in the body of the message — the Subject line doesn't matter) and submissions to
the mailing list address. I'm really beginning to feel sorry for this poor horse, since I keep
beating it, but I can't tell you how many people fail to understand this basic distinction,
and in the process irritate thousands of other people on numerous lists.
To subscribe to a ListProcessor-based mailing list, send subscribe listname your full name
to the ListProcessor address. Just as with the LISTSERV mailing lists, replace listname
with the name of the list you wish to subscribe to and use your real name in place of your
full name. ListProcessor figures out your email address from the header of the message.
You leave a ListProcessor-based mailing list by sending the command unsubscribe
listname to the ListProcessor address. The command signoff listname does exactly the
same thing. Just like the LISTSERV lists, if your address has changed, the automated
process very well may not work, at which point you must talk to the list administrator.
The command to switch a ListProcessor subscription from individual messages to digest
format differs slightly from LISTSERV — send the command set listname mail digest to
Chapter 7 ♦ Email Basics 143
the ListProcessor address. Frankly, I can't see from the instructions how to switch back to
individual messages.
If all else fails, try sending the ListProcessor the help command for a simple reference
card that explains the options.
Using Majordomo
This is getting kind of boring, but Majordomo works pretty much like the other two
mailing list managers. There are two addresses — the Majordomo address to send your
commands to (often majordomo@domain.name), and the mailing list address to send
submissions to (listname@domain.name). You also may (if they're running a recent
version of Majordomo) be able to send commands to listname-request@domain.name.
To subscribe to a Majordomo-based list, send email to the Majordomo address with the
command subscribe listname. Majordomo differs slightly from the other two mailing list
managers in that you don't have to specify your full name, and if you like, you can
append an email address to the subscription command. This enables you to subscribe
someone else to a mailing list, which can be handy — just don't abuse it. The same struc-
ture applies to removing yourself or someone else from a list — send unsubscribe
listname to the Majordomo address (signoff listname works as well).
An easier method of subscribing and unsubscribing to Majordomo-based lists is to send
email to list name -request@domain. name with either the subscribe command or the
unsubscribe command in the body of the message. Since you've made it clear which list
you want to subscribe to with the address, there's no need to include it in the subscription
command.
Finally, you can send Majordomo a help command to see what other options are avail-
able. 1 always recommend that you do this, just so you know how and so that you see
what's possible.
Neither Rain, Nor Snow. . .
Since you're likely to use email heavily, I hope you've gotten a sense for how it works, the
sorts of things you shouldn't do with it, what an email program should do for you, and
what it makes possible in terms of mailing lists. There are thousands of mailing lists
available on the Internet, and you can find some wonderful discussions. If you'd like to
search for a good one, check out this URL via a Web browser:
http : / /alpha . acast . nova . edu : 80 / listserv . html
But, enough about mailing lists — let's move on to the next sort of discussion lists, the
Usenet newsgroups.
Part II
Note
Usenet News
Basics
Tve talked generally about the thousands of Usenet newsgroups that hold fast-moving
discussions on every imaginable topic. My host machine, for example, carried over 5,000
of them at last count, and that's nowhere near the entire list, which is closing in on 10,000.
Hundreds of thousands of people read Usenet everj^ day. It's certainly one of the most
interesting, although strange, parts of the Internet.
Prompted by a problem posed by Nicholas Negroponte, head of the MIT Media Lab, Eric
Jorgensen of MIT did a survey in early 1994 to determine the average age and gender of
Usenet readers, Jorgensen received 4,566 responses to his suwey. He figured out that the
average age of the Usenet reader is 30,7 years old (with a standard deviation of 9,4), Eighty-
six and a half percent of the replies came from men, 13,5% came from women, and 0.1%
came from, well, not men or women. Although most nexosgroups he surveyed were heavily
male-dominated, misc.kids (71% female), rec.arts.tv'.soaps (91% female), and
rec.food.sourdough (50% female) were notable exceptions. You may be able to find more
information about the survei/ and the full results in:
htt p : / /WWW . mit . edu : 800 1 / people / nebosit e / home - page . html
146 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
How is Usenet different from the mailing lists we've just looked at in the last chapter? I
see two primary differences, neither of which has to do with the information that flows
through them.
First, although mailing lists may be faster to propagate because they go directly to the
subscriber, they can be extremely inefficient. If only one person on a machine reads a
mailing list, one copy comes in. If, however, 100 people on that machine all read the same
mailing list, then 100 identical copies of each posting must come in, eating up disk space
and slowing down other tasks. This is bad. In contrast, only one copy of every Usenet
message goes to each machine, and any number of people on that machine can read it. So,
assuming that both contained an identical posting (which in reality occurs only occasion-
ally), you could greatly reduce your machine's storage load by reading the Usenet news
group instead of the mailing list.
Second, many people like mailing lists because they always read their mail but may not
always run a separate newsreading program. This situation actually works in favor of
news as well. Most email programs are designed for a relatively small number of mes-
sages, each completely different and unrelated. In contrast, most newsreaders concern
themselves with large numbers of messages, many of which are related, or in a thread. So,
if you read the news and come across an interesting posting, reading the next posting in
that thread is easy (or should be), whether or not the posting is the next one in the list.
Following threads in an email program is generally difficult or impossible.
Given those advantages, how does Usenet work, what do the messages on it look like,
and how do you generally interact with it?
Usenet Plumbing
For the most part, knowing how Usenet actually works isn't even slightly important to
daily life. However, the basic principles may help you to better cope with some of its
quirks and limitations.
The entire concept of Usenet is based on one machine transferring postings to another.
Scale that up so that any one machine carrying Usenet messages talks to at least one other
machine carrying Usenet messages, and you start to see how this simple idea can become
an immense and powerful reality. We're talking about thousands of machines and
millions of people and hundreds of megabytes of data per day.
If you post a message in a Usenet group, your machine passes the message on to all the
machines it talks to, both upstream and downstream. Upstream loosely refers to the ma-
chines that your machine generally gets all of its news from. Downstream loosely refers to
the machines that get all of their news from your machine. In either case, those machines
continue to propagate your message throughout the network, with the Usenet software
that controls the system making sure that your message isn't duplicated ad infinitum
(Latin for "a hell of a lot of times, which irritates everyone").
Note Note
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet Neivs Basics 147
The actual process by which your message travels is equally simple, at least in UUCP. The
Usenet software creates a batch of messages and compresses the batch to reduce transmis-
sion time. When the next machine receives the batch, it unbatches the messages and
places the files in directories known by the news-reading software. One testament to the
simplicity of this scheme is that not all implementations have to use this technique. (In
fact, NNTP, another common method of transferring news, sends only the text of articles
that a specific reader requests while reading news.) InterCon's UUCP/Connect on the
Macintosh, for example, creates a single file for each newsgroup and appends new mes-
sages to that single file (which is much more efficient given the way the Macintosh file
system works). However, most Unix machines store the messages as individual files
within specific directories, and those directories are directly related to the names of the
newsgroups.
Newsgroup Innards
Just as email addresses make sense after you know all the parts, so do the Usenet news-
group names. Although they resemble email addresses, the basic principles are a bit
different.
Although, like email addresses, Usenet newsgroups use periods to separate different parts of
the name, people tend not to use them in conversation. If, for example, you were to tell a
friend about an interesting discussion on comp, sys, mac. misc, you'd say, "Check it out on
comp sys mac misc." Part of the problem may be the linguistic clumsiness of saying all those
"dots," but I suspect more of the reason is that precision isn't nearly as necessary. Unlike
email addresses, you seldom type out newsgroup names. It also may have to do with the fact
that newsgroup names are all unique and easily parsed. ^
g> Usenet News
^ Basics
The premise of the Usenet newsgroup naming scheme is that of a hierarchy. The naming
scheme makes figuring out how to name new groups easy. More important, it maps over
to a hierarchical directory (or folder) structure. On the Unix machines that hold the
newsgroups, therefore, you find a directory called news. Inside that directory are other
directories corresponding to the top-level parts of the hierarchy — alt, comp, misc, news,
rec, sci, — and so on. These directories are abbreviations for alternate, computers, miscel-
laneous, news, recreation, and science, respectively.
I could attempt to create a table listing all the top level hierarchies, but it's a pointless task.
There are many local hierarchies that I have no way of finding (just as many other machines
probably don't carrxf the halcyon or Seattle hierarchies that I can see), and 1 couldn't
begin to guess which hierarchies your machine might carry.
148 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Let's dissect the name of comp . sys . mac . misc, a popular newsgroup. If we first look into
the comp directory, we see more directories corresponding to lang, sys, and so on. Under
sys we find many directories, one for each computer system. There are atari, amiga,
ibm, mac, and gobs of systems that you may never have even heard of. (I certainly haven't
heard of all of them.) After we go into the mac directory, we find the lowest level directo-
ries that correspond to the individual topics about the Mac. These include advocacy,
apps, databases, games, hardware, misc, portables, system, and others. Once inside
those directories (feel like you're in a Russian doll again?), you find the files that hold the
text of the messages (see figure 8.1).
Figure 8.1 An abbreviated Usenet hierarchy tree.
This system may seem a tad clumsy, but remember, as a user you never have to traverse
that entire directory structure. It exists to categorize and classify newsgroups, and to
provide a storage system that maps onto a Unix directory structure.
Note
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet News Basics 149
Historically, this structure was used so that as little C code programming as possible had to
be done to store and retrieve Usenet nezvs. A design goal for B-news and C-news, the earliest
Unix nexus servers, was to make as much of it as possible run as Unix shell scripts, preclud-
ing any fancy binary database backends. Why was that? Laziness is the mother of some
invention.
Message Construction
On the surface, a Usenet posting looks much like an email message (see figure 8.2).
Figure 82 A Usenet header.
The posting's header holds a From line, a Subject line, and a fair amount of other stuff;
next comes the body of the message and a signature.
The header has a few new lines that you may find interesting.
a.
Usenet News
Basics
Nev/sgroups: comp. sys. mac. misc
First comes the Newsgroups line. It lists, separated by commas, all the newsgroups to
which the message is posted. You can post a message to more than one group at a time by
putting more than one group in the Newsgroups line. At that point, an article is cross-
posted. If you must post an article in several groups (wliich is generally frowned on as a
waste of bandwidth), make sure to post via the Newsgroups line and not through indi-
vidual messages. Individual messages take up more space, because a machine stores only
one copy of a cross-posted article along with pointers to it from different groups.
150 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Follow-up-To; comp. sys. mac. misc
The next Usenet-specific line is the Follow-up-To line, which usually contains the name of
the newsgroup in which the article appears. Sometimes, however, you want to post an
article in one group, have a discussion, then move back to another group. In this case you
put the second group in the Follow-up-To line, because whenever anyone posts a follow-
up to your article, the news software makes sure that it ends up in the proper group.
Reply*To: aceOtidbits.com (Adam C. Engst)
When people reply via email to a newsgroup posting, their newsreaders use the address
in the Reply-To line. A Reply-To line makes it easier for people to respond directly rather
than cluttering the group with personal messages or those that aren't relevant to the
group (especially any flames).
Keywords: TidBITS, news, reviews, software acceleration, Newton, Claris
Summary: The latest issue of the free weekly electronic newsletter.
Sometimes you see a Keywords and/or Summary line as well. Although they aren't
universal or enforced, it's often a good idea to fill in these lines for your article before you
post it. That way, people who have set up their newsreaders properly can more effectively
filter articles based on keywords. In addition, some newsreaders show only the header
and first few lines of an article, and then let the reader decide whether she wants to read
the whole thing. A few well-chosen keywords or a concise summary can help make that
decision easier.
Distribution: world
Many articles are only relevant in specific geographic areas. You have two ways to handle
this situation. First, if you're selling a car in, say, Seattle, you should post to a specific
group that goes only to people in Seattle (more or less, anyway), such as Seattle .forsale.
Many of these site-specific groups exist, even down to the machine. There's a group,
halcyon, slip, for example, for discussion about issues affecting SLIP and PPP users of the
halcyon . com machine.
Note
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet News Basics 151
The other way to handle this situation is to use the Distribution line. This enables you to
limit the area to which your message is distributed, even if the group encompasses all of
Usenet. So, if you want to post a notice about a Seattle British Car Show in rec . autos,
you should put Seattle, or possibly pnw (for Pacific Northwest), in the Distribution line.
Subject: TidBITS#189/16-Aug-93 posted in c.s.m. digest
And of course we have the ubiquitous Subject line. Much as it is courteous for you to
provide a descriptive Subject line in an email message, it's imperative in a Usenet post-
ing. Most newsreaders these days show the user a list of the messages and their subjects.
If you don't provide a good Subject line, far fewer people even notice your message.
For example, each week I post an announcement of each issue of TidBITS in the
comp . sys . mac . misc group. Instead of a general Subject line such as "TidBITS posted,"
I enter "TidBITS#189/ 16- Aug-93 posted in c.s.m. digest." This tells the reader in precise
terms what I posted and where he can find it.
The Newsgroup Stork
Now that you know something about how messages travel from machine to machine and
how the naming system works, you may wonder where new newsgroups come from.
Whenever I've talked about the range of Usenet groups. I've said something to the effect
of "and if there isn't one that matches your interests, you can create one." That is true, but
the process is not trivial.
fi» Usenet News
Basics
Although 1 summarize the process in this section, if you want to see all the gory details, ^
check out two periodic postings in news . announce . newusers. Both "Hozv to Create a
Neio Usenet Newsgroup" and "The Usenet Nezvsgroup Creation Companion" are required
reading for anyone seriously considering creating a new group.
Remember the first rule in creating new groups: Don't do so unless you are absolutely
sure no appropriate group already exists. Usually, you simply haven't found the right
group. Once you do, the need to create a group disappears. The Usenet structure lends
itself to talking about almost any subject in an existing group. For instance, you can talk
about anything Macintosh-related in comp . sys . mac . misc. Thus, the second rule of
creating a new group: Don't create a group until the traffic in a more general group has
grown unmanageable, and stayed that way for some time. As a rule of thumb, wait six
months. And, one way or another, make sure you have a Usenet old-timer on your side,
to help with the details and steer you clear of any egregious mistakes.
152 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
After you are sure the world really does need a group dedicated to discussion of the
psychology of smelling flowers from under cork trees, you write a proposal. This
Request for Discussion, or RFD, states what the group is called, what its purpose is, why
no existing group serves the need, and so on. Then your job as agitator begins, as you
distribute the RFD to groups where interested parties might hang out. Be sure to place the
news . announce . newgroups group first in the Newsgroups line (so the moderator can
correct any problems in the RFD before posting it to news. announce. newgroups and the
others for you) and to set the Follow-up-To line so that the discussion takes place in
news . groups. Then you encourage discussion of the topic for 30 days in news . groups, all
the while collecting responses and modifying the proposal, called a charter, accordingly.
After 30 days, if people don't agree on the charter, you must start the RFD process
again — with a new and improved proposal, of course. If everyone does agree on the
charter, the time has come for a Call For Votes, or CFV, with clear and unbiased directions
on how to vote.
The CFV goes, once again, to all the interested newsgroups, with
news .announce. newgroups first in the Newsgroups line. It lasts between 21 and 31 days,
and you must include the exact end date in the CFV. Once again, your job is to collect and
tally the votes via email. (Don't even think of stuffing the electronic ballot box — there's
little the Usenet community hates more than a cheat.) You must record each voter's email
address along with his Yes or No vote, for later use. You can re-post the CFV during the
vote to keep up awareness, but only if you don't change anything from the original CFV.
At the end of the voting period, you post the results — including the total number of votes,
and the vote and email address for each — to news . announce . newgroups and the other
interested newsgroups. Then everyone waits five days, which provides enough time to
correct any mistakes or raise serious objections. You need to meet two separate goals to
justify a newsgroup. A sufficient number of votes and, within that number, a sufficient
number of YES votes. If you have at least 100 more YES votes (for creating the news-
group) than NO votes, and at least two-thirds of the votes are YES votes, then the group
passes the vote.
If, of course, you don't get the required number or percentage of votes, the group doesn't
get created. There's no shame in not having your group created. You can even try again in
six months if you want; interest may have increased since the original failure. If you fail
more than twice, give it up and form your own mailing list. You don't need anyone's
cooperation to do that.
If the vote comes out positive, someone (often the moderator of
news . announce . newgroups) can create the group, sending out the newsgroup control
message. Gradually, the group is created at different sites and propagates through much
of the network. Why not the entire netw^ork? Well, nothing says a machine has to carry
every Usenet group in existence. If a system administrator decides that talking about
smelling flowers is offensive, she may decide not to carry the group. None of the ma-
chines that rely on her machine for news will have the group, either. Nonetheless, groups
Note
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet News Basics 153
focusing on technical issues enjoy relatively complete propagation. Even those discussing
topics that some people find offensive enjoy wide propagation, and often greater reader-
ship, than the technical groups.
Using Usenet
No matter what software you use to access Usenet, you must be aware of some basic
concepts, tasks, and features. When I evaluate different newsreaders such as UUCP/
Connect, NewsWatcher, and NewsHopper in later chapters, I tell whether the newsreader
in question does a good job of handling these tasks and features for you.
Subscribing to Groups
When you first invoke a newsreader, you must subscribe to the groups you want to read.
Occasionally, the newsreader automatically subscribes you to a couple of basic groups,
such as news . newusers . questions and news . announce . newusers. For the most part,
however, the thousands of available newsgroups are in the unsubscribed category.
Most machines don't carry all of the Usenet groups. If your machine doesn't carry a group
you zvant, you can either ask the system administrator to get it, or go to a machine that lets
anyone read news on it. These sites are called public NNTP sites. Be foreumrned, hoioever,
that few, if any of these sites still exist, and I knoiv of none. It's a simple problem— whenever
a public NNTP site becomes known, so many people try to use it that it immediately stops
being public.
Generally, the first time you start up a newsreader it takes a long time because you have
to go through all the groups and figure out which ones to subscribe to. The better news-
readers allow you to sort through the list at different times. In the past, you had to sit for
an hour or more just unsubscribing from all the groups that you didn't want to read. It
was a major hassle. Even now, allot plenty of time to your first session if you're doing it
interactively. (Note: This rule doesn't apply to a UUCP connection, where you request
only specific groups.)
Reading Articles
After you subscribe to a group, it's time to read the articles. Obviously, the first time you
read, all the articles are new to you. After that, you want to make sure that you read only
previously unread articles. Most newsreaders are extremely good about keeping track of
what you've read already. In the Unix world, the .newsrc file tracks what you've read.
Advanced users can edit that file manually with a text editor, to subscribe or unsubscribe
from several groups at once. The Macintosh newsreaders make that task, on the whole,
unnecessary.
Usenet News
Basics
Note
154 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You've learned what the header for a Usenet article might look like, but many news-
readers hide most of the header from you. This is generally helpful, although it can be
a pain at times.
Discussions happen in threads, which are groups of related articles, generally with the
same or very similar Subject lines. Threads are important because they group both
discussions that you want to read and those you don't want to read. Believe me, threads
are a very big deal when you have to handle the kind of volume that passes through a
popular newsgroup.
When it comes to newsreaders, there are two basic philosophies. The first, which is older,
assumes that you want to read 90 percent of the information in a newsgroup. Therefore,
the newsreader tries to show you the text of every article unless you explicitly tell it to
skip that article or thread. This method may have worked better in the days when Usenet
traffic was relatively sparse, but in these modern times, the traffic comes fast and thick. I
liken this method to trying to drink from a fire hose.
The second philosophy believes that you want to read only 10 percent of the articles in
any given group. With the exception of moderated groups or low-volume groups where
every message counts, this assumption is far more realistic. Newsreaders built on this
philosophy usually provide a list of the unread messages in a newsgroup, then let you
pick and choose which to read. Some newsreaders force you to read each message or
thread as you pick it. Others make you pick a whole bunch of them at once and then read
them after you've sorted through the entire newsgroup. Both methods have their advan-
tages, and a good newsreader lets you work either way.
One of the most frequently asked-for programs in comp, sys, mac. comm is an off-line
newsreader, a program that enables you to save articles to disk and then read them zvhen
you aren't connected to the Internet. There are afeio ways of getting this capability in a
newsreader (UUCP is inherently off-line, for instance), and I discuss them later in this book.
Navigation
After you start reading a set of messages, you need tools for navigating among them.
Navigation tools were more important back in the days when character-based Unix
newsreaders were all we had. Today, many of the Macintosh newsreaders replace the
navigation commands with mouse actions. Howev^er, many people (myself included) find
the keyboard to be more efficient than the mouse for navigating through news, so perhaps
there's still room for some of the old tools.
The most common navigation capability takes you to the next unread message, whether
or not it is in the same thread as the message that preceded it. Closely related is the
capability to move to the next unread message in the same thread, even if it's not next to
the message you were just reading. In a well-designed newsreader, these two capabilities
are closely intertwined, so you don't have to know whether or not you're in a thread.
Note
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet News Basics 155
Often, these navigation features are encapsulated in a single command linked to the
Spacebar, which thus serves as an unusual computer command. Essentially, it says to the
newsreader, "Do whatever makes the most sense right here." Computers hate those sort of
commands, but the concept works extremely loell in a nezosreader. The Spacebar scrolls down
the page. When you hit the bottom of the article, you probably want to read the next article in
the thread, so the Spacebar takes you there. When you finish all the articles in that thread,
you probably want to go back up and read the next thread, so the Spacebar takes you back up.
Finally, after you read everything in a newsgroup, the Spacebar assumes that you want to
read the next newsgroup you subscribe to. By making intelligent guesses, a number of
commands can be subsumed under that one key.
You want to group discussions into threads so that you can easily read an entire one, even
when it spans a fair amount of real world time. You also want to group discussions so
you can ignore them more easily. Despite the fact that people should include descriptive
Subject lines in their postings, they don't always. If you see a long thread called "Cool
Stuff," you have no idea what it's about. It may pique your curiosity, though, so you start
reading, only to find out that it's another "my computer is better than your computer"
flame war. Now you need a way to kill the entire thread. Good newsreaders make that
effort easy.
An even neater feature is the ability to create a list of Subject lines or topics about which
you never want to read. This capability usually applies to anything in the header and
sometimes to information in the body of the messages, too. It's extremely useful for
customizing your Usenet reading experience. To go even one step further, a few
newsreaders provide a feature to only read articles that match certain topics. These are
ideal for the truly busy user. ^
Usenet News
After you read all the messages that interest you, it's generally a good idea to mark the ^
rest of them as read (even though you didn't read them). This way, you don't see them
again the next time you read news. Some newsreaders handle this option automatically,
whereas others make you mark them manually. Sometimes, especially if you just returned
from a vacation, you may want to mark everything as read without even trying to read
the waiting messages. Marking everything lets you start with a clean slate and with a
manageable number of messages the next day, and is generally referred to as catching up.
There's no difference between a "catch up" feature and a "mark all as read" feature, but
you may see both terms.
Now you know all about navigating around Usenet and reading articles. Many people
never move past that point, and are called lurkers. The term has no negative connotation,
it simply means people who only read and never post.
rotl3
I almost forgot. You might occasionally run across articles that are completely unreadable.
They may be in a newsgroup specific to a language that you don't understand, but the
156 biternet Starter Kit for Macintosh
newsreader can't help with that problem. It can (or should be able to) help you with
messages coded in the rotl3 format. Rotl3 is a simple coding scheme that assigns a
number to each letter of the alphabet, starting with 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on, for every
character in a message. It then adds 13 to each number and converts back into letters. The
result is an utterly unreadable message, which the poster usually intended because some
people might find the message offensive. If you see such a message and are easily of-
fended, don't read it. No one forces you to use the rotl3 decoding feature that exists in
most newsreaders. If you do, you can't very well complain about the contents. I usually
see most rotl3 encoded postings in joke newsgroups, protecting the innocent from really
sick jokes (see figure 8.3).
roll 3 sample ■■ -
Show's Principio: Build a system that even o fool con use, and only
a fool will uoni to use it.
A
g
FunJ * f Cevopvcyr: Ohvyq n flfgrz gung rlro n sbby pno hfr, noq boyl
n sbby Juyy Jnog gb hfr vg.
Hi:
2:06PM jris.
a
Figure 8.3 Normal text versus rotl3.
Extracting Binary Files
In the days of yore, when true Internet connections were less common, files were often
passed around the world by being posted in special binaries newsgroups, and even today,
you'll see groups like comp . binaries . mac. Files are still posted to Usenet, although the
majority of them seem to be copyright violations of dirty pictures. A good newsreader
makes it easy to download binary files posted in Usenet, although I strongly recommend
that you use FTP to get files if you have a choice.
FTP works much better than a newsreader for downloading files and saves a ton of
bandwidth because the files aren't being transferred to sites where no one will download
them. Of course, if you only have a UUCP comiection, or for some other reason you can't
use FTP, then snagging binary files posted to Usenet may be your only hope.
Replying to Articles
In the course of reading Usenet news, you often see messages that aren't quite clear or
that catch your interest for some reason or another. When you see such a message, you
may want to send email to the poster. You could, of course, copy down the poster's email
address from the header onto a little piece of paper, and when you finished reading news,
use your email program to send him a message. However, that process is a pain and
wastes lots of little pieces of paper, so most newsreaders support sending mail replies
while you're reading news.
Note
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet News Basics 157
Use email replies whenever the rest of the group won't give a hoot about what you have
to say. Most of us feel that our words are pearls of wisdom and should be distributed to
the widest possible audience. But, try to step back and think about whether your reply is
best directed at the individual making the posting or the group as a whole.
People often ask questions on Usenet, saying that you should reply directly to them and
that they plan to summarize to the net. Listen to what these people have to say. They only
want replies via email, and because they've promised to post a summary of the replies,
you don't need to ask for a copy personally (unless perhaps you don't stand a chance of
seeing the summary in the newsgroup; even then, ask nicely). If you ever post a question
and promise a summary, live up to your promise, even if you get only a couple of re-
sponses. No matter how many responses you get, format them nicely with quote charac-
ters before each quoted line so that they are easy for readers to understand; messages are
often confusing as to who wrote what in a summary. Never re-post entire headers.
As far as what to say when you reply to postings on Usenet, reread what I said about
email manners in the last chapter. The same rules apply here. If you must carry out a
flame war, do it in email; but if possible, don't do it at all.
Follow-ups
Discussions are the entire point of Usenet, of course, so you eventually gather the courage
to post something to a newsgroup. For most people, the easiest way to post a message is
to reply to another message, an action called /o//ort;/n^ up. A follow-up is easier for the
novice because the newsreader fills in most of the lines in the header for you; the lines for
Subject, Newsgroups, Distribution, and so on are generally determined by the message
you reply to.
Just as in email, you should be given the chance to quote the previous message so that
readers can understand the context of your reply. Some newsreaders are picky about the
proportion of quoted text to new text, and for good reason. No one wants to read a two-
screen quoted letter only to see at the bottom a few words from you: "I agree with all
this." Even in newsreaders that don't prevent you from over-quoting, be careful. Try to
edit out as much of the quoted text as possible. Remember that most people have already
seen that message in its original form, so you're simply jogging their memory. Definitely
remove signatures and unnecessary previously quoted text.
Using Usenet as a method of getting a message to a specific individual is considered ex-
tremely bad form, even if you can't seem to get email to that person. Imagine, everyone's
discussing nuclear disarmament, and you suddenly see a message from a college friend. Your
note discussing old tunes at Catatonic University will hold absolutely no interest for the rest
of the group. If you find yourself being flamed, suffer and don't do it again.
Note Note
158 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
Posting an Article
If you really have something new to say, or a new question to ask, don't insert it into an
existing thread just because it' s easier than posting a new one. Posting a new message
should be simple enough in any decent newsreader.
If you cannot post from a neiosreadcr (because you only have an AppleLink account, for
mstance), you can still send messages to a Usenet newsgroup. Two email posting services
exist: news-groupt^s . utexas . edu and news -group&pws . bull . com. Do not send
email to news -group, but to the name of the group to which you want to post, replacing the
dots in the group name with dashes. So, for example, to post to comp . sys . mac . comm, send
email to comp - sys -mac- comm&cs , utexas. edu. Make sure to ask for replies via email.
In general, you should avoid posting a few things. Avoid copyrighted works such as
magazine articles or newspaper stories. Although it's unlikely that anyone could sue the
Internet (it would be a bit like boxing with a dense mist), you might be sued for copyright
infringement. Besides, posting copyrighted work is not polite. Simply post the complete
reference to the article or whatever, along with a summary or selected quote or two if you
want to pique some curiosity.
Interestingly, recipes in cookbooks are not copyrighted because they are essentially lists of
instructions. However, the instructions for creating the recipe may be protected if they
contain anything other than the bare bones instructions, and any preface explaining or
describing the recipe is definitely protected. People often post a recipe or two from a cookbook
that they particidarly like so that others can see whether they like the recipes enough to buy
the book.
Perhaps the least obvious but most important works to avoid posting are pictures scanned
in from magazines or videos and sounds digitized from TV or videotape. Most of the
scanned pictures are varying degrees of erotic images, and unfortunately, most are blatant
examples of copyright infringement. The magazines. Playboy in particular, don't look
kindly on this sort of thing, and legal action might result. Besides, pictures suck up disk
space, and the quality of a scanned image doesn't even begin to approach the high-quality
photography and printing of most magazines.
In general, you should not post headline events that everyone can read about in the
newspaper or possibly in ClariNet (coming up next). I don't mean to imply that you can't
talk about these events, but because news travels relatively slowly to all parts of the net,
announcing the results of an election or a similar event is just silly. People probably
already know about the event, and if they don't, they'll figure it out from the ensuing
discussion.
Chapter 8 ♦ Usenet News Basics 159
Finally, don't post personal email that you receive unless the sender gives you explicit
permission. As with most things on the Internet, posting personal email is a legally murky
area, but the etiquette is crystal-clear: It's rude.
ClariNet
Along with all the discussion groups about computers and recreational activities and
whatnot, you may see a hierarchy under clari. You've found ClariNet. Unlike Usenet,
ClariNet doesn't carry any discussions, and in fact, I don't believe that you can post to
any ClariNet groups. Instead, ClariNet is dedicated to distributing commercial informa-
tion, much of it the same stuff that you read in your newspaper or hear on the radio.
ClariNet claims over 60,000 daily readers, which isn't too bad in terms of circulation.
Also unlike Usenet, ClariNet isn't free. A site must pay a certain amount to receive the
ClariNet news feed, which uses the same transport protocols and newsreaders as Usenet.
Sites that receive the ClariNet feed cannot redistribute that feed on to other machines
unless those machines pay for it as well. Because of ClariNet's commercial nature, I can't
predict whether you even have access to it. It's strictly up to each site.
Much of the ClariNet information comes from press wires like UPI, along with
NewsBytes computer articles, and various syndicated columnists such as Miss Manners.
A recent arrival is Dilhert, the cartoon by Scott Adams (although you have to download
each installment and view it in a graphics program, since there isn't a newsreader around
that can view graphics internally, although a properly configured Web browser might be
able to handle the task). Although you can probably find much of the information in a
standard newspaper, ClariNet organizes it extremely well, making reading about a single
topic much easier. For instance, some groups carrj^ local news briefs for each state, some
carry only news about Apple Computer, and there are groups with tantalizing names like
clari. news . goodnews, which indeed includes only articles that are good news. (Depress-
ingly, that newsgroup sees very little traffic.)
ClariNet was founded a few years ago by Brad Templeton, who is also well known as
the creator of the moderated group rec . humor . funny, which accepts only jokes that he
thinks are funny (actually, someone else does the selection now). ClariNet is important,
because it is specifically commercial traffic flowing via the same methods and pathways
as Usenet, perhaps the most rabidly anti-commercial part of the Internet. I don't know
the business details of ClariNet, but it has been around long enough that I suspect it's a
financial success, and the news that it brings is certainly welcome.
160 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Enough Usenet
Well, that's enough on Usenet. You must experience Usenet to truly understand it,
though, so I do recommend that you find a few groups that interest you and lurk for a
while once you have your connection set up. You're now ready to learn about the services
that require a full connection to the Internet, such as FTP, Telnet, WAIS, Gopher, and the
World Wide Web.
Chapter
9
TCP/IP Internet
Services
I must tread a fine line when talking about Internet services, because the level of connec-
tion (and thus the level of service) varies widely. People who can send Internet email, for
instance, may not be able to use Gopher or the World Wide Web. The services that I talk
about in this chapter (except for FTP and Archie via email) all require a full TCP/IP
connection to the Internet. For Mac folks, a full TCP/IP connection to the Internet means
that you have MacTCP loaded and properly configured, and either a dedicated Internet
connection or a modem connection via PPP or SLIP. If you don't have the proper sort
of account and connection, you do not have a full TCP/IP connection to the Internet.
To be fair, there are some ways of getting access to these services via America Online,
CompuServe, or some of the bulletin board systems, and in those cases you're limited
to the software they provide for you.
FTP
Despite the occasionally confusing way people use the term both as a noun and a verb,
most people don't have much trouble using FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and
not surprisingly, it's only good for transferring files between machines. In the past, you
162 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
could only use an FTP client to access files stored on FTP servers. Today, however,
enough other services such as Gopher and the World Wide Web have implemented the
FTP protocols that you can often FTP files no matter what service you happen to be using.
Heck, you can even FTP files via email. Til get to the specifics of the different clients in
later chapters; for now, here are a few salient facts to keep in mind regarding FTP.
FTP Manners
The Internet does a wonderful job of hiding geographical boundaries. You may never
realize that a person with whom you correspond lives on the other side of the globe.
When using FTP, however, try to keep the physical location of the remote macliine in
mind.
First, as with everything on the Internet, someone pays for all this traffic. It's probably
not you directly, so try to behave like a good citizen who's being given free access to an
amazing resource. Show some consideration by not, for example, using machines in
Australia when one in the same area of your country works equally well. Because trans-
oceanic traffic is expensive, many machines mirror others; that is, they make sure to
transfer the entire contents of one machine to the other, updating the file collection on a
regular, often daily basis.
Here's an example. Because the Info-Mac archive site at sumex-aim . Stanford . edu is
popular and kept up-to-date, other sites carrying Macintosh software don't want to
duplicate the effort. It's much easier to set up a mirror to sumex so that machines in
Australia and Scandinavia can have exactly the same contents as sumex. Mirroring not
only saves work, it also enables users in those countries to access a cheaper, local site for
files. Everyone wins, but only if you, the user, utilize local sites whenever possible. You
can usually tell where a site is located by looking at the two-letter country domain at the
end of the address.
Sometimes, of course, the file you need exists only on a remote site in Finland, for ex-
ample, so that's where you must go to get it. Another point of etiquette to keep in mind is
sensitivity to the time of day at the site from which you retrieve a file. Like most things in
life other than universities during exams, more people use the Internet during their
daytime hours than at night. Thus, it's generally polite to retrieve files during off hours;
otherwise, you're preventing people from doing their work. That's not polite, especially if
the file you're retrieving is a massive QuickTime movie or something equally frivolous.
Notice that I said "their daytime hours." Because the Internet spans the globe, it may be
4:00 A.M. where you are, but it's the middle of the day somewhere else. You can figure out
the local time by using the Map control panel that comes with your Mac.
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 163
FTP Clients
FTP is inherently simple to use, but there's plenty of room for FTP client software to make
your life miserable. The following sections, therefore, describe several benefits and
features to look for in an FTP client.
Connecting
People usually use an FTP client program to log on to a remote FTP site, find a file or two,
download them, and then log off. As such, a disproportionate amount of your time is
spent connecting and navigating to the desired files.
A good FTP client enables you to define shortcuts for frequently used FTP sites, along
with the userid and password necessary for connecting to them. This benefit is minor but
makes a big difference when repeated numerous times. I can't tell you how much I hate
typing sumex-aim.stanford.edu on a Unix command line when I'm trying to connect to
that site with FTP.
Navigating
Once you're on, the FTP client program should make it very easy to move between
directories (or folders, in Mac jargon). Some programs do this by emulating the Standard
File Dialog used on the Mac to open and save files, which is a good start (although the
Standard File Dialog is one of the most confusing parts of the Macintosh interface). It's
helpful when the client program remembers the contents of directories. That way, if you
go back to one you've already visited, you don't have to wait for it to refresh.
Other programs, Anarchie and Snatcher mostly, take the navigational aspect of FTP one
step further, and actually emulate the Finder. Snatcher in particular goes a bit overboard
in tr\'ing to mimic the Finder, in my opinion.
A useful variant of shortcuts (also known as bookmarks) to FTP site names is the addition
of directory information to the site name. Say, for instance, you want to retrieve some-
thing from ftp . tidbits . com. Not only do you have to enter the host name, userid, and d
password, but you must also go to the proper directory, which is /pub/tidbits. i
Listing Style
In Unix, you can choose among several different methods of viewing files. Some show
you more information, such as file size and creation date, and others show you less, in
order to fit more entries on the screen. Although the Mac doesn't have the problem of
trying to fit multiple columns in a list (no Macintosh program uses multiple column lists),
not all the FTP clients are good about showing you the entire filename, size, or date. I
TCP/IP
Internet
Services
Note
164 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
think this failure is inexcusable, because you need to know how large a file is before you
spend an hour retrieving it — especially if you're connecting at a slow speed. Make sure
the program you use provides this information. In addition, a truly useful feature is the
capability of sorting the listing on date, file size, or whatnot.
Recogriizing File Type and Decoding
Much of the time, an FTP client can figure out what sort of file you're retrieving by
looking at the extension to the filename. This being the case, the client can make sure it
is transferring the file in the proper format. If you're lucky, it even decodes some of the
common formats that you see on the Internet.
"Wait a minute," you say. "He didn't mention strange file formats before." Sorry about
that. I'll get to file formats in the next chapter, after I've discussed the various different
ways that files may appear on your machine. But first, let's look at how you can retrieve
files from FTP sites armed only with an email program.
FTP by Email
One of the problems with FTP is that it requires your attention — in fact, pretty much your
full attention. In addition, you must have a TCP/IP connection to the Internet. If you're
connecting via AppleLink or UUCP, you simply cannot use FTP normally. The one caveat
to this TCP/IP requirement is that more and more of the commercial services are starting
to support FTP, so you can use FTP on America Online or CompuServe, for instance,
without resorting to FTP by email.
If you're clever and are able to do a little scripting with AppleScript or Frontier, you can
script Anarchic to retrieve files automatically.
There is a solution, although not a terribly good one. You can retrieve files remotely,
using only your email program, in two different ways. The most generic way is by using
one of the FTPmail or BITFTP servers. The other way is to use a specific mailserver
program that only knows how to serve a specific site, sometimes as part of a mailing list
manager such as LISTSERV, ListProcessor, or Majordomo. Let's look at the generic way
first.
FTPmail
Using FTPmail or BITFTP isn't particularly difficult, but it can be extremely frustrating.
The problem is twofold. First, the main FTPmail server is seriously overloaded. Because
it's a free service that someone at DEC runs in their machine's spare time, FTPmail is a
low priority. It can take a week for your file to come back. I've even had requests seem-
ingly disappear into the ether. Second, talking to an FTPmail server is like playing 20
Note
Chapiter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 165
Questions — unless you know precisely what you're looking for, where it is, and are able
to enter the conrunands perfectly, you'll get an error message back. And, if that message
comes back a week later, you may not even have the original information with which to
correct your mistake.
When you use email to retrieve files stored on FTP sites, the files often are split into chunks.
Usually, you can control the size of the chunks, but manually joining them in a word
processor can be difficult. Some email programs, such as Eiidora, and various utilities make
joining file chunks easier. If you don't use Eudora, check out Chunkjoiner and BinHqx (if the
file is a BinHexfile). You can find them in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Talking to an FTPmail or BITFTP server feels much like logging into an FTP site, changing
directories, and finally retrieving the file. The only problem is, you must type in the
commands all at once. So, to get a file from the main FTPmail server, you would send
email to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com, put something in the Subject line (it doesn't care
what, but dislikes empty Subject lines), and then, in the body of the message, put a set of
commands like this:
help
connect ftp.tidbits.com
chdir /pub/tidbits/misc
get easy -view. hqx
quit
So, in English, what you're doing is first getting the help file from FTPmail, then ^ tcp/ip
connecting to the anonymous FTP site at ftp . tidbits . com, then changing into the a. internet
/pub/tidbits/misc/ directory, then retrieving the file called easy- view, hqx, and ^ Services
finally quitting. If you wanted, you could retrieve more files. And, if you included an
Is command, FTPmail would return the directory listing to you, enabling you to see
what's there before requesting specific files.
Needless to say, there are a number of other commands that FTPmail accepts, and you
will probably want to use some of them. They're all explained in the help file that
FTPmail returns to you when you send it the help command.
I only know of one other FTPmail server, and it's in Ireland. It uses a somewhat different
command set, so I don't recommend using it unless you're in Europe. If you want to find
out more about it, send email to f tpmail@ieunet . ie and put the single command help in
the body of the message.
166 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
BITFTP
BITFTP stands for BITNET FTP, or something like that. Machines that are only on BITNET
cannot use FTP normally, so some enterprising programmers created the BITFTP program
to enable BITNET users to retrieve files stored on FTP sites.
1 know of only three BITFTP servers. One is in the U.S., another in Germany, and the third
in Poland (see Table 9.1). Don't use the ones in Europe unless you too are in Europe — it's
a waste of net bandwidth, and probably won't result in particularly good service anyway.
Table 9.1
BITFTP Servers
Server Name
Location
bitf tp@pucc . princeton . edu
VS,
bitftp@vm.gmd.de
Germany
bitf tp@plearn . edu . pi
Poland
Retrieving a file from a BITFTP server works similarly to retrieving a file from
FTPmail, but the commands are somewhat different. Here's how you retrieve the
same file (along with the help file again) that we snagged before. Send email to
bitf tp@pucc . princeton . edu and put these commands in the body of the letter:
help
ftp ftp.tidbits.com
user anonymous
cd /pub/tidbits/misc
get easy • view. hqx
quit
Enough about BITFTP. You can probably figure out the rest on your own, with the aid of
the help file. I wouldn't want to spoil all the fun of figuring some of this stuff out for
yourself!
Mailservers
More common than FTPmail or BITFTP programs that serve everyone are mailser\''er
programs that provide email access to FTP archives on a specific site. There are many of
these mailservers around, although finding them can be a bit difficult, and I cannot tell
which FTP sites that might interest you also have mailservers. I can, however, tell you of
a few mailservers that you may find useful. Each has its own command structure.
Note Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 167
BART, the mailserver for the massive Macintosh software archives at
mac.archive.umich.edu, is an extremely useful way to access many Macintosh files,
especially since the load on the machine via FTP is often so great that you cannot easily
connect.
BART is short for Brode's Archive Retrieval Thang. Glad you asked?
BART only provides access to the files stored on mac . archive . umich . edu. If you want
more general access via email, you must use one of the FTPmail or BITFTP servers
mentioned previously. Luckily, because BART is so specific, its command structure is
relatively simple.
For instance, to retrieve help and Stuffit Expander from BART, you would send email
to mac@mac . archive . umich . edu, and in the body of the message you would put the
following commands:
path ace@tidbits.com
help
chunk 1500
send util/compression/stuffitexpander3.52.sea.hqx
That's about it. BART limits you to 1,500K and five files per day (the list of files isn't
currently considered against your quota), so you can't abuse it. Your quota is cleared
every day at midnight (Eastern Daylight Time). Perhaps the main problem with BART is
that if there's something wrong with your request, it tends to ignore the request entirely
and not send any error messages. So, for instance, if you surpass your quota, BART
simply throws out any additional requests and you must send them again after midnight
when your quota has been cleared.
Using the chunk command, you should set your chunk size as high as your mailer can
handle, because that reduces the load on BART and makes it easier for you to deal with
the files on your end.
You may run into trouble with certain fdes if you use Etidora to retrieve them via BART. If
the submitter also used Eudora or a compatible program to attach the file, here's what loill
happen: Eudora will start downloading the first chunk from BART, see that it contains an
attachment, and then complain when it sees the attachment is too short (since the other parts
aren't included). Simply tell Eudora to fetch the attachment again as a normal message, and
it will work fine.
TCP/IP
3- Internet
S Serxices
168 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Mailing List Managers
Mailing list manager programs such as LISTSERV, ListProcessor, and Majordomo also
often provide access to files, although these files aren't always available via FTP. Most
often the files in question are logs of mailing list discussions, but in a few instances,
they're more interesting.
The LISTSERV at Rice University that helps distribute the Info-Mac Digest also provides
access to all of the files stored in the Info-Mac archives at sumex-aim . Stanford . edu.
Using it is simplicity itself. The LISTSERV doesn't care about directory paths, chunks, or
anything like that. You need not specify your email address, or tell the LISTSERV how to
encode the files. Instead, all you do is send listserv@ricevm1 . rice.edu a message with
one-line commands that look like any of the following:
$MAC HELP
$K!AC GET tidbits- 267. etx
Actually, Tm oversimplifying slightly. There are four commands, all told (see Table 9.2).
Table 9.2
LISTSERV File Retrieval Commands
Command
Function
$MAC IND ALL
Gets list of recent or all files
$MAC DIR directory
Gets subdirectory contents
$MAC GET ttaine.hjpc
Gets Info-Mac archive file
$MAC HELP
Gets help information
The LISTSERV limits you to 250K per day, although if you request a single file larger than
that, it won't refuse that single request. Since all new files in the Info-Mac archives are
announced in the Info-Mac Digest, you can easily copy the filenames out to a file request
message as you're reading, send off the message when you're finished, and have files
coming back quite quickly.
Enough about FTP by email. It's like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey with a donkey
the size of... Nah, I'll avoid the easy shot at some sleazy politician. Let's talk next about
how you find files via FTP. The answer is Archie.
Note Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 169
Archie
Archie is an example of what happens when you apply simple technology to a difficult
problem. Here is the problem: How do you find any given file on the nets if you don't
already know where it's located? After all, in comparison with finding a single file on
several million machines, the proverbial haystack looks tiny, and its cousin, the proverbial
needle, sticks out like the sore thumb you get when you find it. In a nutshell, Archie uses
normal FTP commands to get directory listings of all the files on hundreds of anonymous
FTP sites around the world. It then puts these file listings into a database and provides a
simple interface for searching it. That's really all there is to Archie.
Unfortunately, and for reasons I don't fully understand, Archie servers have become less
and less useful over time. They're almost impossible to get through to via an Archie client
(telnetting to them is the most successful in my recent experience), and much of the time
they don't seem to know about certain large FTP sites that I know have the file for which
I'm looking. In other words, sometimes Archie simply won't work. Don't worry about it
and just try another technique or tool.
Archie loas developed in early 1991 by Alan Emtage, Peter Deutsch, (ind Bill Heelanfrom
the McGill University Computing Center, Canada. Development now takes place at a
company founded by Deutsch and Emtage, Bunyip Information Systems. Although the basic
Archie client software is distributed freely, Bunyip sells and supports the Archie server
software.
You can access Archie via Telnet, email. Gopher, the World Wide Web, and special
Macintosh client programs. Some Unix machines may also have Unix Archie clients
installed. It seems to me there are two basic goals an Ardiie client should meet. First, it
should be easy to search for files, but when you want to define a more complex search,
that should be possible as well. Second, since the entire point of finding files is so that you
can retrieve them, an Archie client ideally should make it very easy to retrieve anything
that it finds. This second feature appears to be less common than you would expect. On
the Mac, only Anarchie can retrieve found files with just a double-click.
5^ TCP/IP
^ Internet
NH Services
Archie isn't an acronym for anything, although it took me half an hour searching through
files about Archie on the Internet to determine that once and for all.
Accessing Archie via email is extremely easy, although the Archie server offers enough
options (I'll let you discover them for yourself) to significantly increase the complexity.
For a basic search through, merely send email to archie@archie . internic . net and put
in the body of the message lines like the following:
170 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
help
find easy*viev/
find easyview
In a short while (or perhaps a long while, depending on the load on the Archie server),
the results should come back — the help file that you asked for and the results of your
search for "easy-view" and "easyview." The example above uses both terms because Tm
not sure of the exact wording of the filename, but experience tells me that one of those
two possibilities is likely.
However, if the Archie server you chose is down, or merely being flaky (as is their wont)
you may want to try another one. There are plenty. Simply send email to the userid
archie at any one of the Archie servers from the list in Table 9.3. As usual, it's polite to
choose a local server.
Table 9.3
Current Archie Servers
Server Name
Server IP Number
Location
archie.au
139.130.4.6
Australia
archie . edvz . uni- linz . ac . at
140.78.3.8
Austria
archie . univie . ac . at
131.130.1.23
Austria
archie . cs . mcgill . ca
132.206.51 .250
Canada
archie. uqam.ca
132.208.250.10
Canada
archie.funet.fi
128.214.6.102
Finland
archie. univ-rennes1 .fr
129.20.128.38
France
archie . th - darmstadt . de
130.83.128.118
Germany
archie.ac.il
132.65.16.18
Israel
archie.unipi.it
131.114.21.10
Italy
archie.wide.ad.jp
133.4.3.6
Japan
archie. hana.nm.kr
128.134.1.1
Korea
archie. sogang.ac.kr
163.239.1.11
Korea
archie.uninett.no
128.39.2.20
Norway
archie . rediris . es
130.206.1.2
Spain
archie.luth.se
130.240.12.30
Sweden
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Senhces 171
Server Name
Senwr IP Number
Location
archie. switch. ch
130.59.1.40
Switzerland
archie. ncu.edu. tw
192.83.166.12
Taiwan
archie . doc .ic.ac.uk
146.169.11.3
United Kingdom
archie.hensa.ac.uk
129.12.21 .25
United Kingdom
archie.unl.edu
129.93.1.14
USA (NE)
archie.internic.net
198.49.45.10
USA (NJ)
archie.rutgers.edu
128.6.18.15
USA (NJ)
archie.ans.net
147.225.1.10
USA (NY)
archie.sura.net
128.167.254.179
USA (MD)
Telnet Usage
Telnet is a bit hard to talk about because using it is just like using a modem to connect to
another computer. Telnet simply enables you to connect to a computer somewhere else on
the Internet and to do whatever that computer allows you to do. Because Telnet is similar
to FTP in the sense that you're logging in to a remote machine, the same rules of etiquette
apply (although running a program over Telnet usually places less stress on a machine).
As long as you try to avoid bogging down the network when people want to use it for
their local work, you shouldn't have to worry about it too much. When you telnet to
another machine, you generally telnet into a specific program that provides information
you want. The folks making that information available may have specific restrictions on
the way you can use their site. Pay attention to these restrictions. The few people who
abuse a network service ruin it for everyone else.
What might you want to look for in a Telnet program? That's a good question, I suppose, tcp/ip
but not one that I'm all that qualified to answer. For the most part, I avoid Telnet-based a internet
command-line interfaces. Thus, in my opinion, you should look for features in a Telnet ^ Services
program that will make using it, and any random program that you may happen to run
on the remote machine, easier to use.
It's useful to be able to save connection documents that save you the work of logging into
a specific machine (but beware of security issues if they also store your password). Also,
any sort of macro capability will come in handy for automating repetitive keystrokes.
Depending on what you're doing, you also may want some feature for capturing the text
that flows by for future reference. And, you should of course be able to copy and paste
out of the Telnet program.
Note
172 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
IRC
IRC, which stands for Internet Relay Chat, is a method of communicating with others on
the Internet in real time. It was written by Jarkko Oikarinen of Finland in 1988 and has
spread to 20 countries. IRC is perhaps better defined as a multi-user chat system, where
people gather in groups that are called channels, usually devoted to some specific subject.
Private conversations also are possible.
IRC gained a certain level of fame during the Gulf War, when updates about the fighting
flowed into a single channel where a huge number of people had gathered to stay up-to-date
on the situation.
I personally have never messed with IRC much, having had some boring experiences with
RELAY, a similar service on BITNET, back in college. I'm not all that fond of IRC, in large
part because I find the amount of useful information there almost nonexistent, and I'm
uninterested in making small talk with people from around the world. Nevertheless, IRC
is one of the most popular Internet services. Thousands of people connect to IRC servers
throughout any given day. If you're interested in IRC, refer to the section on it back in
chapter 5, the excerpt from Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh. That should give you a sense
of what IRC is like. You can find more information in the IRC tutorials posted for anony-
mous FTP in:
ftp://cs-ftp.bu.edu/irc/support/
Client programs for many different platforms exist, including two for the Macintosh
called ircle and Homer. Much as with Telnet, you're looking for features that make the
tedious parts of IRC simpler. I could blather on about all the features you might want, but
frankly, if you're using a Macintosh with either a Unix shell account or a MacTCP-based
account, just get Homer. It has more features than one would think possible, and can
even — in conjunction with Apple's PlainTalk sofhvare — speak some or all of the text that
flows by.
MUDs
MUD, which stands for Multi-User Dungeon or often Multi-User Dimension, may be one of
the most dangerously addictive services available on the Internet. The basic idea is
somewhat like the text adventures of old, where you type in commands like "Go south,"
"Get knife," and so on. The difference with MUDs is that they can take place in a wide
variety of different realities — ^basically anything someone could dream up. More impor-
tantly, the characters in the MUD are actually other people interacting with you in real
Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 173
time. Finally, after you reach a certain level of proficiency, you are often allowed to
modify the environment of the MUD.
The allure of the MUDs should be obvious. Suddenly, you can become your favorite alter-
ego, describing yourself in any way you want. Your alternate-reality prowess is based on
your intellect, and if you rise high enough, you can literally change your world. Particu-
larly for those who may feel powerless or put upon in the real world, the world of the
MUD is an attractive escape, despite its text-environment limitations.
After the publication of an article about MUDs, the magazine Wired printed a letter from
someone who had watched his brother fail out of an engineering degree and was watch-
ing his fiancee, a fourth-year astrophysics student, suffer similar academic problems, both
due to their addictions to MUDs. But don't take my word for it; read the letter for yourself
on Wired's Web server:
http: //vww. wired. com/Etext/1 . 4/departments/rants. html
Wired's Web server requires authentication now, which means that you must sign up with
them and get a userid and a password before you can get in. It's free, and you can register at:
http :/ /wwv/ . wired . com/
I've seen people close to me fall prey to the addictive lure of MUDs. As an experiment in
interactive communications and human online interactions, MUDs are extremely interest-
ing, but be aware of the time they can consume from your real life.
I don't want to imply that MUDs are evil. Like almost anything else, they can be abused.
But in other situations, they have been used in fascinating ways, such as to create an
online classroom for geographically separated students. There's also a very real question
of what constitutes addiction and what constitutes real life. Td say that someone who is ^ tcp/ip
failing out of college or failing to perform acceptably at work because of a MUD has a 3. internet
problem, but if that person is replacing several hours per day of television with MUDing, S Services
it's a tougher call. Similarly, is playing hours and hours of golf each w^eek any better than
Stretching your mind in the imaginative world of a MUD? You decide, but remember:
there are certain parts of real life that we cannot and should not blow off in favor of a
virtual environment.
Although MUDs are currently text-only, rudimentary graphics will almost certainly
appear at some point, followed by more realistic graphics, sound, and video, and perhaps
some day even links to the virtual reality systems of tomorrow. I don't even want to
speculate on what those changes might mean to society, but you may want to think about
what may happen, both positive and negative.
174 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MUDs generally run under Unix, but you could run your own with a Macintosh port
of a MUD, called MacMud, and connect to other Unix MUDs with a simple MUD client
program, MUDDweller. Even more interesting is the program Meeting Space from a
small company called World Benders. Meeting Space is billed as a virtual conference
room, and is marketed to large businesses as a money- and time-saving alternative to
business trips. However, it's actually a business MUD with a snazzy Macintosh interface
and hefty price tag. Meeting Space works over any Macintosh network, including the
Internet, and although I don't know of any public Meeting Space servers yet, some were
being discussed earlier. For more information about Meeting Space, send email to
wb - inf o@wopldbenders - com and check out the discussion of it later on in chapter 27,
"Utilities & Miscellany."
WAIS
Unlike almost every other resource mentioned in this book, the WAIS, or Wide Area
Information Servers, project had its conception in big business and was designed for big
business. The project started in response to a basic problem. Professionals from all walks
of life, and corporate executives in particular, need tremendous amounts of information
that is usually stored online in vast databases. However, corporate executives are almost
always incredibly busy people without the time, inclination, or skills to learn a complex
database query language. Of course, corporate executives are not alone in this situation;
many people have the same needs and limitations.
In 1991, four large companies — Apple Computer, Dow Jones <& Co., Thinking Machines
Corporation, and KPMG Peat Marwick — ^joined together to create a prototype system to
address this pressing problem. Apple brought its user interface design expertise; Dow
Jones was involved because of its massive databases of information; Thinking Machines
provided the programming and expertise in high-end information retrieval engines; and
KPMG Peat Marwick provided the information-hungry guinea pigs.
One of the initial concepts was the formation of an organizational memory — the com-
bined set of memos, reports, guidelines, email, and whatnot — that make up the textual
history of an organization. Because all of these items are primarily text and completely
without stmcture, stuffing them into a standard relational database is like trying to fill a
room with balloons. They don't fit well, they're always escaping, and you can never find
anything. WAIS was designed to help with this problem.
So far I haven't said anything about how WAIS became such a useful tool for finding free
information. With such corporate parentage, it's in some ways surprising that it did. The
important thing about the design of WAIS is that it doesn't discriminate. WAIS can
incorporate data from many different sources, distribute them over various types of
netw^orks, and record whether the data is free or carries a fee. WAIS is also scalable, so
that it can accept an increasing number and complexity of information sources. This is an
important feature in today's world of exponentially increasing amounts of information.
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 175
The end result of these design features is that WAIS works perfectly well for serving
financial reports to harried executives, but equally well for providing science fiction book
reviews to curious undergraduates.
In addition, the WAIS protocol is an Internet standard and is freely available, as are some
clients and servers. Anyone can set up her own WAIS server for anyone with a WAIS
client to access. Eventually, we may see Microsoft, Lotus, and WordPerfect duking it
out over who has the best client for accessing WAIS. With the turn the Internet has
taken in the past year, however, it's far more likely that we'll see Microsoft, Lotus, and
WordPerfect (now a division of Novell) competing with World Wide Web clients. Al-
though WAIS has continued to grow in utility and popularity, it has also faded into the
shadow of the snazzier looking Web clients. That's not to say that WAIS isn't being used
heavily, just that it tends to work behind the scenes as a search engine for a Web page
interface, rather than through a dedicated client program.
At the beginning of this section, I mentioned the problem of most people not knowing
how to communicate in complex database query languages. WAIS solves that problem
by implementing a sophisticated natural language input system, which is a fancy way of
saying that you can talk to it in English. If you want to find more information about
deforestation in the Amazon rain forest, you simply formulate your query as: "Tell me
about deforestation in the Amazon rain forest." Pretty rough, eh? In its current state,
WAIS does not actually examine your question for semantic content; that is, it searches
based on the useful words it finds in your question (and ignores, for instance, "in" and
"the"). However, nothing prevents advances in language processing from augmenting
WAIS so that it has a better idea of what you mean.
In any database, you find only the items that match your search. In a very large database,
though, you often find far too many items; so many, in fact, that you are equally at a loss
as to what might be useful. WAIS attempts to solve this problem with ranking and rel-
evance feedback. Ranking is just what it says. WAIS looks at each item that answers the
user's question and ranks them based on the proximity of words and other variables. The
better the match, the higher up the document appears in your list of found items. Al-
though by no means perfect, this basic method works well in practice. ? tcp/ip
Internet
Relevance feedback, although a fuzzier concept, also helps you refine a search. If you ask S Services
a question and WAIS returns 30 documents that match, you may find one or two that are
almost exactly what you're looking for. You can then refine the search by telling WAIS, in
effect, that those one or two documents are "relevant" and that it should go look for other
documents that are "similar" to the relevant ones. Relevance feedback is basically a
computer method of pointing at something and saying, "Get me more like this."
The rise of services such as WAIS and Gopher on the Internet will by no means put
librarians out of business. Instead, the opposite is true. Librarians are trained in ways of
searching and refining searches. We need their experience, both in making sense of the
frantic increase in information resources and in setting up the information services of
176 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
tomorrow. More than ever, we need to eliminate the stereotype of the little old lady
among dusty books and replace it with an image of a person who can help us navigate
through data in ways we never could ourselves. There will always be a need for human
experts.
When you put all this information together, you end up with a true electronic publishmg
system. This definition, pulled from a paper written by Brewster Kahle, then of Thinking
Machines and now president of WAIS, Inc., is important for Internet users to keep in
mind as the future becomes the present: "Electronic publishing is the distribution of
textual information over electronic networks." (Kahle later mentions that the WAIS
protocol does not prohibit the transmission of audio or video.) I emphasize that definition
because Tve been fighting to spread it for some years now because of my role with
TidBITS.
2 Electronic publishing has little to do with using computer tools to create paper publications.
o For those of you who know about Adobe Acrobat, Common Ground from No Hands Soft-
ware, Envoy from Novell, and Replica from Farallon, those programs aren't directly related
to electronic publishing because they all work on the metaphor of a printed page. With them,
you create a page and then print to a file format that other platforms can read (using special
readers), but never edit or reuse in any significant way. We're talking about electronic fax
machines. We should enjoy greater flexibility with electronic data.
So, how can you use WAIS? I see two basic uses. Most of the queries WAIS gets are
probably one-time shots where the user has a question and wants to see whether WAIS
stores any information that can provide the answer. This use has much in common with
the way reference librarians work — someone comes in, asks a question, gets an answer,
and leaves.
More interesting for the future of electronic publishing is a second use, that of periodic
information requests. As I said earlier in this book, most people read specific sections of
the newspaper and, even within those sections, are choosy about what they do and don't
read. I, for instance, always read the sports section but I am interested only in baseball,
basketball, football to a lesser extent, and hockey only if the Pittsburgh Penguins are
mentioned. Even within the sports I follow closely, baseball and basketball, Tm more
interested in certain teams and players than others.
Rather than skim through the paper each Sunday to see whether anything interesting
happened to the teams or players I follow, I can instead ask a question of a WAIS-based
newspaper system (which is conceivable right now, using the UPI news feed that ClariNet
sells via Usenet). In fact, I might not ask only one question, but I may gradually come up
with a set of questions, some specific, others abstract. Along with "What's happening
with Cal Ripken and the Baltimore Orioles?" could be "Tell me about the U.S. economy."
Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 177
In either case, WAIS would run my requests periodically, every day or two, and indicate
which items are new in the list. Ideally, the actual searching would take place at night to
minimize the load on the network and to make the search seem faster than the technology
permits. Once again, this capability is entirely possible today; all that lacks for common
usage is the vast quantities of information necessary to address everyone's varied inter-
ests. Although the amount of data available in WAIS is still limited (if you call 700-plus
sources limited), serious and important uses are already occurring.
There's a project, probably destined to be commercial, in testing now that xvill provide this
sort of an electronic newspaper. I'm not quite sure yet how WAIS is involved in it, but there
are some links. Check out this URL for more information:
http://www.ensemble.com/
In large part due to its corporate parentage, the WAIS project has been careful to allow for
information to be sold and for owners of the information to control who can access the
data and when. Although not foolproof, the fact that WAIS addresses these issues makes
it easier to deal with copyright laws and information theft.
Because of the controls WAIS allows, information providers are likely to start making
sources of information more widely available. With the proliferation of these information
sources, it will become harder for the user to keep track of what's available. To handle
that problem, WAIS incorporates a Directory of Servers, which tracks all the available
information servers. Posing a question to the Directory of Servers source (WAIS calls sets
of information sources or sefvers) returns a list of servers that may have information per-
taining to your question. You can then easily ask the same question of those servers
to reach the actual data.
Most of the data available on WAIS is public and free at the moment, and I don't expect
that arrangement to change. I do expect more commercial data to appear in the future, ^ tcp/ip
however. 5- internet
S Services
In regard to that issue I want to propose two ideas. First, charges should be very low to
allow and encourage access, which means that profit is made on high volume rather than
high price. Given the size of the Internet, I think this approach is the way to go, rather
than charging exorbitant amounts for a simple search that may not even turn up the
answer to your question.
Second, I'd like to see the appearance of more "information handlers," who foot the cost
of putting a machine on the Internet and buying WAIS server software and then, for a
percentage, allow others to create information sources on their server. WAIS, Inc. already
provides this service, but I haven't heard of much competition yet. That service enables a
small publisher to make, say, a financial newsletter available to the Internet public for a
Note
178 [utenief Starter Kit for Macintosh
small fee, but the publisher doesn't have to go to the expense of setting up and maintain-
ing a WAIS server. This arrangement will become more commonplace; the question is
when? Of course, as the prices of server machines, server software, and network connec-
tions drop, the number of such providers will increase.
WAIS has numerous client interfaces for numerous platforms, but you probably can use
either a simple VTIOO interface via Telnet or, if you have a MacTCP link to the Internet,
a program called MacWAIS. When evaluating WAIS client programs, keep in mind my
comments about the two types of questions and the relevance feedback. A WAIS client
should make it easy to ask a quick question without screwing around with a weird
interface, and it should also enable you to save questions for repeated use (as in the
electronic newspaper example). Similarly, with relevance feedback, that act of pointing
and saying, "Find me more like this one that I'm pointing at" should be as simple as
possible without making you jump through hoops.
Finally, none of the WAIS clients I've seen provide a simple method of keeping track of
new sources as they appear, not to mention keeping track of which sources have gone
away for good.
Gopher
In direct contrast to WAIS, Gopher originated in academia at the University of Minnesota,
where it was intended to help distribute campus information to staff and students. The
name is actually a two-way pun (there's probably a word for that) because Gopher was
designed to enable you to "go fer" some information. Many people probably picked up
on that pun, but the less well-known one is that the University of Minnesota is colloqui-
ally known as the home of the Golden Gophers, the school mascot. In addition, one of the
Gopher Team members said that there are gophers living outside their office.
Calling yourself the Golden Gophers makes more sense than calling yourself the Trojans, riot
only considering that the Trojans were one of the most well-known groups in history that
lost, but also considering that they lost the Trojan War because they fell for a really dumb
trick. "He}/, there's a gigantic wooden horse outside, and all the Greeks have left. Let's bring
it inside!" Not a formula for long-term survival Now, if they had formed a taskforce to
study the Trojan Horse and report back to a committee, everyone wouldn't have been
massacred. WTjo says middle management is useless? Anyway, I digress.
The point of Gopher is to make information available over the network, much in the same
way that FTP does. In some respects. Gopher and FTP are competing standards for
information retrieval, although they serve somewhat different purposes. Gopher only
works for retrieving data; you cannot use it to send data. Also, there's no easy way to give
Gopher users usernames and passwords so only they can access a Gopher site.
Note Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 179
Gopher has several advantages over FTP. First, it provides direct access to far more types
of information resources than FTP. Gopher provides access to online phone books, online
library catalogs, the text of the actual files, databases of information stored in WAIS,
various email directories, Usenet news, and Archie. Second, Gopher pulls all this informa-
tion together under one interface and makes it all available from a basic menu system.
Menu items on a Gopher server are not Macintosh menus, but list itetns in a Macintosh
window under TurboGopher, Keep that in mind, and you'll be fine.
If you retrieve a file via FTP and the file gives you a reference to another FTP serv'er, you
as the user must connect to that site separately to retrieve any more files from there. In
contrast, you connect to a single home Gopher server, and from there, wend your way out
into the wide world of Gopherspace without ever having to consciously disconnect from
one site and connect to another (although that is what happens under the hood). Gopher
servers almost always point at each other, so after browsing through one Gopher server in
Europe, you may pick a menu item that brings you back to a directory on your home
server. Physical location matters little, if at all, in Gopherspace.
Gopher has also become popular because it uses less net bandwidth than standard FTP.
When you connect to a Gopher server, the Gopher client software actually connects only
long enough to retrieve the menu, and then it disconnects. When you select something
from the menu, the client connects again veiy^ quickly, so you barely notice that you
weren't actually wasting net bandwidth during that time. Administrators like using
Gopher for this reason. They don't have to use as much computing power providing files
to Internet users.
There's actually no reason zohy FTP servers couldn't be reioritten to work this way, as zuell
Jim Mattheius, the author of Fetch, is always going on about how writing an FTP server that
used something called lightweight threads would make FTP more efficient. In the mean- ? tcp/ip
time, Peter Lewis's Anarchie FTP client for the Mac works much like a Gopher client in that ^
it is continually connecting again and again to your target FTP site, enabling you to perform
more than one FTP task at a time.
Several Gopher clients exist for the Macintosh. The one written by the Gopher program-
mers themselves is arguably the best Gopher client for any platform. They claim that it's
the fastest over slow connections, and although I haven't used clients on other platforms,
TurboGopher is certainly fast. You also can access Gopher via Telnet and a VTIOO inter-
face. It's nowhere near as nice (it's slower, you can only do one thing at a time, and you
cannot view pictures and the like online), but it works if you don't have MacTCP-based
access to the Internet.
Note
180 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Veronica
The most important adjunct to Gopher is a service called Veronica, developed by Steve
Foster and Fred Barrie at University of Nevada. Basically, Veronica is to Gopher what
Archie is to FTP — a searching agent; hence, the name.
Veronica stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized
Archives, but apparently the acronym followed the name,
Veronica servers work much like Archie servers. They tunnel through Gopherspace
recording the names of available items and adding them to a massive database.
You usually find a Veronica menu within an item called Other Gopher and Information
Servers, or occasionally simply World. When you perform a Veronica search, you either
look for Gopher directories, which contain files, or you look for everything available via
Gopher, which includes the files and things like WAIS sources as well. There are only a
few Veronica servers in the world (between four and six, depending on which machines
are up), so you may find that the servers are heavily overloaded at times, at which point
they'll tell you that there are too many connections and tliat you should try again later.
Although it's not as polite as I'd like, I find that using the European Veronica servers
during their night is the least frustrating.
It's definitely worth reading the "Frequently Asked Questions about Veronica" document
that lives with the actual Veronica servers. It provides all sorts of useful information
about how Veronica works, including the options for limiting your search to only directo-
ries or only searchable items. You can use Boolean searches within Veronica, and there are
ways of searching for word stems — that is, the beginning of words. So, if you wanted to
learn about yachting, you could search for "yacht*." The possibilities aren't endless, but
Veronica is utterly indispensable for navigating Gopherspace and for searching on the
Internet in general.
Jughead
Getting sick of the Archie Comics puns yet? They just keep coming and, like Veronica,
I somehow doubt that this acronym came before the name. ]ughead stands for jonzy's
Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display. Jughead does approximately the same
thing as Veronica, but if you've ever done a Veronica search on some generic word, you
know that Veronica can provide just a few too many responses (insert sarcasm here).
Jughead is generally used to limit the range of a search to a certain machine, and to limit
it to directory titles. This makes Jughead much more useful than Veronica if you know
where you want to search, or if you're only searching on a Gopher server that runs
Jughead.
Note Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 181
I don't use Jughead all that much, because what I like about the massive number of
Veronica results is that they often give me a sense of what information may exist on any
given topic. I suppose that if I regularly performed fairly specific searches on the same set
of Gopher servers. I'd use Jughead more.
The best way to find a generally accessible Jughead server is to do a Veronica search on
"jughead -tl , " TTiaf returns a list of all searchable Jughead servers, rather than all the
documents and directories in Gopherspace that contain the word "jughead."
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is the most recent and ambitious of the major Internet services. The
Web was started at CERN, a high-energy physics research center in Switzerland, as an
academic project. It attempts to provide access to the widest range of information by
linking not only documents made available via its native HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol), but also additional sources of information via Usenet news, FTP, WAIS, and
Gopher. The Web tries to suck in all sorts of data from all sorts of sources, avoiding the
problems of incompatibility by allowing a smart server and a smart client program to
negotiate the format of the data.
CERN doesn't stand for anything any more, but it once was an acronym for a Trench name.
In theory, this capability to negotiate formats enables the Web to accept any type of data,
including multimedia formats, once the proper translation code is added to the servers
and the clients. And, when clients don't understand the type of data that's appearing,
such as a QuickTime movie, for instance, they generally just treat the data as a generic tcp/ip
file, and ask another program to handle it after downloading. ^ internet
S Ser\ices
The theory^ behind the Web makes possible many things, such as linking into massive
databases without the modification of the format in which they're stored, thereby reduc-
ing the amount of redundant or outdated information stored on the nets. It also enables
the use of intelligent agents for traversing the Web. But what the Web really does for the
Internet is take us one step further toward total ease of use. Let's think about this evolu-
tion for a minute.
FTP simply transfers a file from one place to another — it's essentially the same thing as
copying a file from one disk to another on the Mac. WAIS took the concept of moving
information from one place to another, and made it possible for client and ser\^er to
agree on exactly what information is transferred. When that information is searched or
182 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
transferred, you get the full text without having to use additional tools to handle the
information. Gopher merged both of those concepts, adding in a simple menu-based
interface that greatly eased the task of browsing through information. Gopher also
pioneered the concept of a virtual space, if you will, where any menu item on a Gopher
server can refer to an actual file anywhere on the Internet. Finally, the World Wide Web
subsumes all of the previous services and concepts, so it can copy files from one place to
another; it can search through and transfer the text present in those files; and it can
present the user with a simple interface for browsing through linked information.
But aside from doing everything that was already possible, the World Wide Web intro-
duced four new concepts. The first one I've mentioned already — it's the capability to
accept and distribute data from any source, given an appropriately written Web server.
Second, the Web introduced the concept of rich text and multimedia elements in Internet
documents. Gopher and WAIS can display the text in a document, but they can't display
it with fonts and styles and sizes and sophisticated formatting. You're limited to straight,
boring text (not that it was boring when it first appeared, I assure you). With the Web,
you can create HTML documents that contain special codes that tell a Web browser
program to display the text in various different fonts and styles and sizes. Web pages
(that's what documents on the Web are generally called) also can contain inline graphics —
that is, graphics that are mixed right in with the text, much as you're used to seeing in
books and magazines. And finally, for something you're not used to seeing in books and
magazines, a Web page can contain sounds and movies, although sound and movie files
are so large that you must follow a link to play each one.
Link? What's a link? Ah, that's the third concept that the Web brought to the Internet. Just
as an item in a Gopher menu can point to a file on another Internet machine in a different
country, so can Web links. The difference is that any Web page can have a large number of
links, all pointing to different files on different machines, and those links can be embed-
ded in the text. For instance, if I were to say in a Web page that I have a really great
collection of penguin pictures stored on another Web page (and if you were reading
this on the Web and not in a book), you could simply click on the underlined words to
immediately jump to that link. Hypertext arrives on the Internet.
Hmm, I should probably explain hypertext. A term coined by Ted Nelson many years
ago, In/pertext refers to nonlinear text. Whereas you normally read left to right, top to
bottom, and beginning to end, in hypertext you follow links that take you to various
different places in the document, or even to other related documents, without having to
scan through the entire text. Assume, for instance, that you're reading about wine. There's
a link to information on the cork trees that produce the corks for wine bottles, so you take
that link, only to see another link to the children's story about Ferdinand the Bull, who
liked lying under a cork tree and smelling the flowers. That section is in turn linked to a
newspaper article about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. A hypertext jump
from there takes you to a biography of Ernest Hemingway, who was a great fan of bull
fighting (and of wine, to bring us full circle). This example is somewhat facetious, but
Note
Chapter 9 ♦ TCP/IP Internet Services 183
hopefully it gives you an idea of the flexibility a hypertext system with sufficient informa-
tion, such as the World Wide Web, can provide.
Fourth, the final new concept the Web introduced to the Internet is forms. Forms are just
what you would think, online forms that you can fill in, but on the Internet, forms become
tremendously powerful because they make possible all sorts of applications, ranging from
surveys to online ordering to reservations to searching agents to who knows what. Forms
are extremely useful, and are increasingly heavily used on the Web for gathering informa-
tion in numerous contexts.
For some time, the Web lacked a searching agent such as Archie or Veronica, a major
limitation because the Web is so huge. However, a number of searching agents have
appeared, and although they simply don't feel as successful as Veronica yet, I suspect
that's merely because I'm less used to them. You can find a page of the Web searching
agents at:
http : / /cuiwww. unige . ch/meta • index . html
In addition, a number of useful subject catalogs have sprung up; currently my favorite
one is called Yahoo, and can be accessed at:
http://www.yahoo.com/
You can access the Web via a terminal and a VTIOO interface, or even via email (which is
agonizingly slow), but for proper usage, you must have a special browser.
To try the Web via email, send email to listproc^wwwQ.cern.ch with the command
WWW in the body of the message.
When you're evaluating Web browsers, there are a number of features to seek. The most
important is one that seems obvious: an easy way to traverse links. Because the entire
point of a Web browser is to display fonts and styles in text, a Web browser should give
you the ability to change the fonts to ones on your Mac that you find easy to read. HTML
documents don't actually include references to Times and Helvetica; they encode text in
certain styles, much like a word processor or page layout program does. Then, when your
Web browser reads the text of a Web page, it decodes the HTML styles and displays them
according to the fonts that are available. Sometimes the defaults are ugly, so I recommend
playing with them a bit. Many, if not most, Web pages also contain graphics, which is all
fine and nice unless you're the impatient sort who dislikes waiting for the graphics to
travel over a slow modem. Web browsers should have an option to turn off auto-loading
of images or let you move on before the images have finished loading. You should be able
to do anything you can do in a normal Mac application, such as copy and paste. You
TCP/IP
Internet
Services
184 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
should be able to save a hotlist, preferably hierarchical, of Web sites that you'd like to visit
again. Finally, you should be able to easily go back to previously visited pages without
having to reload them over the Internet.
As I said previously, there are a number of ways to access the Web. But frankly, if you use
a Mac and don't have access to a MacTCP-based connection, you'll miss out on the best
parts, even if you can see the textual data in a VTIOO browser such as Lynx.
Wrapping Up
That should do it for the background material about the various TCP/IP Internet services,
such as FTP, Telnet, Gopher, WAIS, the World Wide Web, and a few other minor ones
like IRC and MUDs. Feel free to flip back here and browse if you're confused about basic
usage or what might be important to look for in a client program.
Enough about all the Internet services. But, before we go on and talk about ways you can
get Internet access, I should explain about all the different file formats that you run into
on the Internet. They're a source of confusion for many new users, so let's move on to
chapter 10, "File Formats."
Note
File Formats
On the Macintosh, we're all used to the simple concept of double-clicking on a document
icon to open it in the proper application. The Macintosh keeps track of which documents
go with which applications by type and creator codes. Thus, we tend not to think about
file formats as much as people who use operating systems that lack the Mac's elegance.
Nonetheless, every Mac file does have a format, and if you've ever seen the "Application
not found" message, you may have wished for an easier way to determine a file's format.
Various utility programs such as Apple's free ResEdit and PrairieSoft's commercial DiskTop
can show you the type and creator codes that the Mac's Finder uses to link documents and
applications. You can find ResEdit at:
ftp://ftp.info . apple . com/Apple . Support .Area/Apple .Software .Updates/Macintosh/
Utilities . Software / ResEdit . 2 . 1 . 3 . sea . hqx
When you start exploring, you quickly discover that most files on the Internet have
filename extensions, as is standard in DOS. Unlike DOS, Unix allows long filenames, so
you don't have to think of meaningless eight-character names for everything. Extensions
are extremely useful on the Internet because they identify what sort of file you're looking
at. On the Mac, you see a different icon or you can double-click on the file and see what
program launches, but on the Internet, all you get is the filename and extension.
Unlike standard DOS usage, in which every program seems to have at least one or two
extensions for its documents (.wk1, .wks, .doc, .wp, .dbf, .ndx, .idx, and other thor-
oughly memorable three-letter combinations), a limited set of extensions is commonly
Note
186 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
used for files that Mac users care about. These extensions fall into three basic categories:
those used to indicate ASCII encoding, those used to indicate compression formats, and
several others used to mark certain types of text, graphics, sound, and video files.
ASCII Encoding
Programs and other binary data files (files with more than just straight text in them)
contain binary codes that most email programs don't understand, because email pro-
grams are designed to display only text. Binary data files even Include data files, such as
word processor files, which contain formatting information or other nonprinting charac-
ters. Most programs enable you to save your files in a variety of formats, including text. If
you don't explicitly save a file in some kind of text format, then it's probably a binary data
file, although there are exceptions.
The main exceptions to this are Apple's TeachText and SimpleText and Nisus Software's
Nisus Writer word processor, TeachText and SimpleText can save only text files. Nisus
Writer saves its files in such a way that all other programs see them as text files (the format-
ting lives in the file's resource fork, if you were wondering).
Computers of different types generally agree on only the first 128 characters in the ASCII
character set. (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.) The
important fact to remember is that after those first 128 characters, which include the
letters of the alphabet and numbers and punctuation, a Mac's accented letter may be a
DOS machine's smiley face.
Still, people want to transfer files via email and other programs that cannot handle all the
possible binary codes in a data file or application. Programmers therefore came up with
several different ways of representing 8 bits of binary data in 7 bits of straight text. In
other words, these conversion programs can take in a binary file such as the Alarm Clock
desk accessory, for instance, and convert it into a long string of numbers, letters, and
punctuation marks. Another program can take that string of text and turn it back into a
functioning copy of the Alarm Clock desk accessory. I'll leave it to the pliilosophers to
decide whether it is the same program.
Once encoded, that file can travel through almost any email gateway and be displayed in
any email program, although it's worthless until you download it to the Mac and decode
it. The main drawback to this sort of encoding is that you must always decode the file
before you can work with it, although many programs on the Mac decode for you auto-
matically. In addition, because you move from an 8-bit file to a 7-bit file during the
encoding process, the encoded file must be larger than the original, sometimes by as
much as 35 percent.
Note
Chapter 10 ♦ File Formats 187
Now that you understand why we go through such bother, the Internet uses three main
encoding formats (see Table 10.1): BiuHex, iiueucode, and btoa (read as "b to a").
Table 10.1
ASCII Encoding Formats
Format
Advantages
Disadvantages
BinHex
uuencode
btoa
Macintosh standard
Used by LAN email gateways
Most efficient
Least efficient
Doesn't encode resource fork
Least common
BinHex
BinHex is by far the most common format you see in the Macintosh world because it
originated on the Mac and works best with Macintosh files. In fact, it's basically used only
on Macintosh computers. You can identify most BinHex files by the . hqx extension they
carry. I haven't the foggiest idea why it is . hqx instead of . bhx or something slightly
more reasonable. Keep in mind that BinHex is another one of these computer words that
works as a verb, too, so people say that they binhexed a file before sending it to you.
There's another reason for using BinHex when working with Macintosh files, Macintosh files
have two forks, a data fork and a resource fork. Most other operating systems don't under-
stand different forks, so you need a way to combine the forks into a single file suitable for
uploading to a different machine. There are two basic ways to do this, MacBinaiy and
BinHex, MacBinary creates a binary file that combines the tzvo forks, whereas BinHex
combines them in a text file. Smce text files have other advantages in terms of surviving mail
gateways, people use BinHex far more often. MacBinary files must be downloaded in binary
mode and usually end with a .bin extension. Most programs that can download files
understand MacBinary, but if they don't you can get a stand-alone version at:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
There are two flavors of BinHex, but they aren't interchangeable. The BinHex 4.0 format
was originally created by Yves Lempereur and has been around forever. BinHex 5.0,
which also came from Yves, is more recent but unfortunately causes massive confusion
because it doesn't turn binary files into ASCII. Ignore BinHex 5.0 entirely, because every-
one else does.
Part II
Note Note
188
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
BinHex 4.0 is a file format, and numerous programs can encode and decode that format. Yves
wrote a program called BinHex 4.0 years ago, but it has some known hugs and should be
avoided. I recommend that you use Aladdin's free Stuffit Expander for dehinhexing files,
especially because it can also expand various compression formats, and because it's on the
ISKM disk.
Every BinHex file starts with the phrase (This file must be converted with BinHex
4,0) even if another program actually did the creating. Then comes a new line with a
colon at the start, followed by many lines of ASCII gibberish. Only the last line can be a
different length than the others (each line has a hard return after it), and the last character
must be a colon as well (see figure 10.1). Occasionally, something happens to a BinHex file
in transit and one line is shortened by a character or two or even deleted. When that
happens, the file is toast.
BinHeH.hqH
0/219
D1
<This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)
; "N>^TEHKPH ! ••849K86NP653‘»3"eJ5 ! N 1 4 1 P94SDfl-JCQPXC5 " TFb 'UGflOd > ‘ J? JFfe
KE • ' JF f &VF * oP ) • CTE • 8JG • KKC« " f 3 JE * PUC5"dEb “ eF f 8XQpb ) ’ 92B f pND§ j
R > < 4SDCG2Fb 1 0$80SC89bFb ! 2N ! - J , 8&NB€hbb3 » I :
ID um
Figure 10.1 Example of BinHex.
BinHex suffers from only two real problems other than a confusing name. It is perhaps
the least efficient of the three encoding formats, which means that it wastes more space
than other formats. Oh well, just because something is the standard doesn't mean it's the
best. Its other real problem is that even though tools exist for debinhexing files on other
platforms, they aren't common. Use uuencode if you plan to send binary files that have
only a data fork (such as Microsoft Word files, for instance) to a user on another platform
Under Unix, you must use a program called mcvert to debinhex files. If you wish to encode
or decode BinHex files on a PC, you can find a PC version of BinHex at:
f tp : / /boombox .micro . umn . edu/pub/binhex/MSDOS/binhex . exe
uucode
In the Unix world, uucode (also called uuencode) is the most common format. You can
identify a uuencoded file by its ,uu extension.
Note Note
Chapter 10 ^ File Formats 189
Although not in common usage in the Macintosh world, uucode is seen frequently
enough that a number of Macintosh programs have sprung up to encode and decode this
format. These include Stuffit Deluxe, UULite, and UMCP Tools, among others. You're
unlikely to run across uuencoded Macintosh files frequently, mostly because uucode
format ignores the resource fork of Macintosh files, making it useful for files that only
have a data fork. For example, most programs store their code in the resource fork so
uuencoding and then uudecoding a program renders the result totally unusable. You may
run across slightly different extensions on occasion; Tve also seen . uud and . uue. They're
all the same thing.
By default, most LAN-based email programs (such as Microsoft Mail) that have Internet
gateways encode binary files sent across the Internet in uucode format, since it's the ?nost
common.
Most uuencoded files start with begin 644, followed by the filename. From that point on,
they look a lot like BinHex files: rows upon rows of ASCII gibberish with each line being
the same length. (Actually, these lines may not all look the same length when you're
viewing them on the Mac, because Unix machines use the ASCII 10 linefeed character
instead of a carriage return, which the Mac uses to end a line.)
Because the number 644 is related to Unix file permissions (don't ask), other numbers are
possible at the top of uuencoded files, although I see them less freque7itly.
All uuencoded files end with a linefeed, a space, the word end, and another linefeed (see
figure 10.2).
iSi
uucode. uu
0/160
□ I
begin 644uucode
riS&fl I <R I F ; 6QE<&ESCfc I U< U0e82 1 S , 6«L ; " ! S86UP ; gPEL02 ! T : ec»T<$DG
M9" ! L : 6ME < * 10 C ‘ 5S92 ! F ; W < M6VC . U 1 1 ; F < 1 9UVS-*-fT-eURE97 )S< “ XH
•+B n061fi;710
end
m w
Figure 10.2 Example of uucode.
btoa
Frankly, I don't know a lot about btoa, which stands for binary to ASCII. This format (see
figure 10.3) is supported by a complementary atob convertor, which translates ASCII files
back into binary. It is reportedly the most efficient of the three, so a btoa file is slightly
Part II
190 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
smaller than the equivalent uuencode or BinHex file. In addition, btoa retains the multiple
forks of Macintosh files, unlike uucode. Despite these seemingly major advantages, btoa
doesn't appear nearly as frequently in the Unix world as uuencode, and appears rarely in
the Macintosh world. As far as I know, the only program that can decode the btoa format
on the Mac is Stuffit Deluxe, through one if its many translators.
Figure 10.3 Example of btoa.
Compression Formats
Along with the various ASCII encoded formats, on the Internet you frequently see a
number of file extensions that indicate the files have been compressed in some way.
Almost every file available on the Internet is compressed because disk space is at a
premium everywhere.
Unfortunately, because the majority of Macintosh files stored on the Internet are binhexed
after being compressed, you don't see the full benefit of the compression. Nevertheless, if
your original file is 200K and a compression program reduces it to 75K, you're still on the
winning side even if binliexing the file increases it back up to lOOK.
The folks who run the Internet file sites like two things to be true about a compression
format. First, they want it to be as tight as possible, so as to save the most space. Second,
they want to be sure that the files stored in that format will be accessible essentially
forever. This requires the format of the compressed files to be made public; in theory, any
competent programmer can write a program to expand those files should the company go
out of business or otherwise disappear.
This second desire has caused some trouble over the years because the compression
market is hotly contested. Companies seldom want to put their proprietary compression
algorithms (the rules by which a file is compressed) into the public domain, where their
competitors can copy them. For a while there was a project on the Internet to create a
public format based on some other public compression formats, but it never saw the light
of day. As it is, the only compression format widely available in the Macintosh world that
is also public domain is that used by Stuffit 1.5.1, an older and less efficient version of the
now-proprietary Stuffit 3.0 format.
Most people on the Internet compress Macintosh files in one of three ways: Stuffit,
Compact Pro, or as a self-extracting archive. In addition, there are at least three or four
Note
Chapter 10 ^ File Formats 191
other programs that can compress files, but few people ever use them for files posted on
the Internet, other than for self-extracting archives.
Stuffit 3.0
Perhaps the most popular Macintosh compression format on the nets today is Stuffit 3.0,
which is used by a family of programs — some free (Stuffit Expander), some shareware
(Stuffit Lite), and some commercial (Stuffit Deluxe) — from Aladdin Systems. Stuffit files
always have the . sit extension. The only confusion here is that the Stuffit file format has
gone through three main incarnations: 1.5.1, 2.0, and 3.0. The latest versions of all the
Stuffit tools can read all of those formats, but not surprisingly, Stuffit 2.0-class tools can
read only files created in 2.0 or 1.5.1, and Stuffit 1.5.1 can read only files in its specific
format.
Although the Stuffit file format is version 3.0, the latest version of the programs is 3.5— the
file format didn't change when Aladdin revised the programs.
This limitation leads to the common problem on the nets whereby people download a file
in Stuffit 3.0 format assuming they can expand it with a Stuffit 2.0-class program because
of the . sit extension. Unfortunately, because all three file formats use the - sit extension,
the extension provides no useful indication, and Stuffit 2.0 spits up all over a Stuffit 3.0
file. The simple solution to this problem (and most other compression problems) is — and
listen carefully — Stuffit Expander.
Stuffit Expander can expand any Stuffit format, it can expand Compact Pro archives, and
as an added bonus it can debinhex files as well. It slices, it dices, and. .. let me just say that
no one should be without Stuffit Expander. That's why I put it on the ISKM disk. Thanks
are due to Aladdin Systems for making such a useful tool available for free. You can find
the latest versions of Stuffit Expander and Stuffit Lite online in the directory:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
There's actually a caveat to Stuffit Expander being free. Aladdin Systems has released a
shareware program called DropStuff with Expander Enhancer which, when you pay your
shareware fee, gives Stuffit Expander the capability to expand basically all the file formats
that the full Stuffit Deluxe can expand through its translators. In addition, you can stuff
files quickly by merely dropping them on DropStuff, so it's a doubly useful program. I
strongly recommend you register DropStuff with Expander Enhancer if you intend to
work with many different file types from the Internet. Another way to get the same
functionality is to buy one of Aladdin's commercial programs, such as Stuffit Deluxe or
SITcomm.
Part II
192 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Compact Pro
Compact Pro, a shareware compression utility from Bill Goodman, is almost as popular as
the Stuffit family in the Macintosh world. Functionally, Stuffit and Compact Pro do the
same thing — create a compressed archive of one or more files. In my experience, both
utilities do an admirable job, so personal preference and other features may sway you one
way or the other.
Compact Pro files are always identified by their . cpt extension. You may see an earlier
version of Compact Pro floating around on the nets as well. It's called Compactor and
uses the same file format as Compact Pro, so you don't have to worry about which
version created a given file. Compactor is just an older version of Compact Pro, but Bill
Goodman had to change the name for legal reasons. You can find Compact Pro in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.coin/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Self-Extracting Archives
What if you want to send a compressed file or files to a friend who you know has no
compression utilities at all? Then you use a self-extracting archive, wliich is hard to describe
further than the name already does. Most compression programs on the market can create
self-extracting archives by compressing the file and then attaching a stub, or small expan-
sion program, to the compressed file. The self-extracting archive looks like an application
to the user, and if you double-click on a self-extracting archive, it launches and expands
the file contained within it. Internet file sites prefer not to have many files, particularly
small ones, compressed in self-extracting archives because the stubs are a waste of space
for most people on the nets, who already have utilities to expand compressed files.
You can always identify self-extracting archives by the . sea extension. You can tell by
the icon which compression program created any given self-extracting archive, but on
the whole it makes no difference. The only exceptions to this naming scheme are self-
extracting archives created by Alysis's SuperDisk program, which automatically appends
the . X to the end of its self-extracting archives. You don't see many, if any, of these.
Unix Compression
Unix has a built-in compression program called, in an uncharacteristically straightfor-
ward fashion for Unix, Compress. Compress creates files with the . Z extension (note the
capital Z — it makes a difference). Although you don't see files with that extension too
often in Macintosh file sites, plenty of them exist on the rest of the net. Both Stuffit and a
program called MacCompress (available in the URL below) can expand these files, should
you need to do so:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Note Note
Chapter 20 ♦ File Formats 193
Incidentally, MacCompress was written by Lloyd Chambers, who later went on to write
DiskDoubler and AutoDoubler, starthig the transparent compression market in the
Macintosh world.
As far as I know. Compress works only on a single file, but you often want to put more
than one file in an archive. All of the Mac compression programs both archive and
compress in a single step. Under Unix, however, you need to perform the archiving step
before you compress the file (and of course, if you want to mail it to someone, then you
need to uuencode it). A program called Tar (which stands for Tape archive) archives under
Unix; files archived with Tar get a .tar extension. If you archive a bunch of files with Tar,
then shrink them with Compress, and then uuencode the compressed file to send to
someone, the resulting filename may end with . tar . Z . uue to indicate what you've done
to it and in what order.
Recently, a new format, called gzip, has started to take over the Unix world. It's marked
by the . z or . gz extension. Gzip is the free GNU version of ZIP, a popular PC compres-
sion format. A Macintosh version, called MacGzip, recently appeared to decode these files.
You can find it online in:
ftp: //ftp. tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
What's GNU? Not much, what's GNU with you? Somj, but my editor made me put that in,
GNU stands for the paradoxical "GNU's Not Unix" and is a project to create a fully func-
tional version of Unix that you are free to do with as you please.
More Compression Formats
You may run across several other compression formats in your net travels. Not many
people use these formats for files distributed to the world, but a few do, so the rest of us
have to stay on our toes. DiskDoubler, from Symantec, can create "combined files" that
generally have a . dd extension. Symantec makes a free DDExpandOnly application
available for people who don't own DiskDoubler. Alysis's SuperDisk can create its own
. X self-extracting archives. Now Compress, from Now Software, can make stand-alone
and self-extracting archives. If you run into one of the stand-alone files, look for the free
Expand Now application from Now Software in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Part II
Note
194
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Don't be confused about DiskDoubler's company, because it changed since the first edition of
this book. Lloyd Chambers wrote DiskDoubler for his company, Salient Software, which was
then purchased by Fifth Generation Systems, Then, Symantec bought Fifth Generation
Systems, getting DiskDoubler and the other Salient utilities in the bargain. It's kind of an
industry food chain...
If you run across a very old archive, it might have a . pit extension, which means that it
was created by an old program called Packit (which I haven't seen in years). Don't bother
looking for Packit, and if you find it, don't create any files with it because it's a dead
format. Several of the compression utilities (I don't have a Packit file to even test this)
claim to be able to expand Packit files, but frankly, no one cares much anymore.
DOS Compression
Unfortunately, at some point you are bound to run into files compressed with DOS
programs. In most cases these files are text files that you can easily read on a Mac as long
as you can expand them. The most common DOS format is the ZIP format, which uses the
.zip extension. Several shareware tools, such as Zipit and UnZip, exist for unzipping
these files, and Stuffit Deluxe also includes a translator for unzipping files. You can find
these utilities in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Almost totally unseen these days is the . arc extension, which was a common format
several years ago, so there were several DOS programs that created and expanded . arc
files. Once again, if you see one of these extensions on the Mac, try using Stuffit's
translators.
Other File Types
You may want to keep in mind a number of other file type issues, relating both to format-
ting text files for different systems and to graphics files that you find on the Internet.
Text Files
Text files are universally indicated by the . txt extension, and after that, the main tiling
you have to watch for is the end-of-line character.
Unix expects the end-of-line character to be a linefeed (LF, or ASCII character 10), which
usually shows up on the Mac as a little box because it's a nonprinting character in most
Note
Chapter 10 ^ File Formats 195
fonts. The Mac ends its lines with carriage returns (CR, or ASCII character 13), and to
further confuse the issue, DOS machines straddle the fence and use a carriage return and
linefeed combination (CR/LF).
Because the Internet is nondenominational when it comes to computer religion (that is,
the Internet as a whole; almost every individual is rabid about his or her choice of com-
puter platform), most communication programs are good about making sure to put any
outgoing text into a format that other platforms can read. Most programs also attempt
to read in text and display it correctly no matter what machine originally formatted it.
Unfortunately, as hard as these programs may try, they often fail, so you must pay
attention to what sort of text you send out and retrieve — via email, FTP, Gopher, or
whatnot.
When you're sending files from a Mac, the main thing to remember is to break the lines
before 80 characters. "Eighty characters," you say. "How the heck am I supposed to figure
out how many characters are on a line without counting them all? After all, the Mac has
superior proportionally spaced fonts. Humph!"
Yeah, well, forget about those fonts when you're dealing with the Internet. You can't
guarantee that anyone reading what you write even has those fonts, so stick to a mono-
spaced font such as Monaco or Courier. I personally recommend Monaco 9 point if your
eyes don't mind. Then, I recommend setting your word processor's ruler (if that's where
you're typing the file) to approximately 6.25 inches. That way, you have around
64 characters per line, give or take a few. Finally, if you're using a sophisticated word
processor such as Nisus Writer, you can run a macro that replaces spaces at the end of
each line with hard returns. If you don't use Nisus Writer, you can probably find an
option that enables you to Save As Text, and that inserts returns at the end of each line
in the process.
There are also several utilities, including one called Add/Strip, that add returns for you. You
can find Add/Strip in the usual place:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
After your lines have hard returns (carriage returns on the Mac) at the end, you usually
can send a file properly, because most communications programs can handle replacing
carriage returns with linefeeds or perhaps simply adding linefeeds. If you don't add
returns and someone tries to read your text file under DOS or Unix, the file may or may
not display correctly. There's no telling, depending on that person's individual circum-
stances, but you usually hear about it if you screw up. Test with something short if you're
unsure whether you can send and receive text files properly.
Part II
Note
196 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Often, the Internet client program automatically strips and replaces linefeeds with car-
riage returns on files coming in from the Internet. If that doesn't happen, you either can
use Add /Strip or one of its compatriots, or just run a Find and Replace in your word
processor.
If you search for the linefeed (by copying the little box from the document into the Find field
in your word processor) and replace it with the carriage return, the file still has hard returns
at the end of every line. Instead, try this: Search for two linefeeds; replace them with some
special character that doesn't otheruuse exist in the document (I usually use Option-8, the
bullet); then search for one linefeed and replace it with a space; finally, replace your bullets
zvith carriage returns. As a result, you get nicely wrapped text (assuming of course, that
there were blank lines separating paragraphs in the original file).
The other reason to view files from the Internet in a monospaced font with lines delimited
by hard returns is that people on the Internet can be incredibly creative with ASCII tables
and charts. Using only the standard characters you see on your keyboard, these people
manage to create some extremely complex tables and graphics. I can't say they are works
of art, but I'm often impressed. If you wrap the lines and view in a proportionally spaced
font, those ASCII tables and graphics look like textual garbage.
Setext
One other note on text formatting on the Internet. Ian Feldman, with megabytes of
comments from me and several others, has defined a "structure-enhanced text" format
specifically for electronic periodicals. Files encoded in setext format should have the .etx
extension. TidBITS was the first publication to use setext, but more are switching to it
every day. Setext has the advantage of being eminently readable online, where it con-
forms to the least common denominator of Internet machines (less than 70-character-long
lines, only the standard character set, and so on), but special front-end programs enable
you to browse a setext file and add structure, navigational capabilities, and enhanced
display features such as fonts and styles. The idea is to profit from the best of both worlds,
the online text-based platforms and the graphically oriented client machines many of us
use.
The trick setext employs to remain so unobtrusive online while retaining a format that
special browsers can read is making the code implicit in the text and using accepted
online styles when possible (see figure 10.4). The title of a setext file, for instance, is a line
of characters followed by another line of the exact same number of equal signs, effectively
forming a double underline. Subheads are similar, but they are followed by lines of
dashes, forming a single underline. Words that should be bold when decoded are sand-
wiched by asterisk pairs like **this**, and words that should be underlined are sand-
wiched by underscores like _this_.
Chapter 20 ♦ File Formats 197
seteHt
To: oceflidbi Is .con Cfldan C. Engst>
Subject: Re: selext in Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
From: lanfProndom.se <lan Feldman)
Date; Sun, 12 Jun Q4 22:54:48 +0200
Setext, the structure-enhonced text
SBSKSSSBSSmmSSSBaKSKSBSSMaBSaSSSSX
Unique among filenames encountered on the internet ore files
ending with an ".etx" suffix, such as TIdBiTS, but no longer
only TIdBITS. Despite its Extra Terrestrial ouertones the ".etx**
stands only for "enhanced text" Unlike most other suffixes that
indicate the type or the binary-encoding, physical format of a
file, the ".etx* signifies merely that the text in question is a
setext, a plain text that has been orranged, .laid out. in such
a way, that it may RLSO be read in non-linear fashion. The weekly
all-RSCil issues of TidBITS can therefore be consumed as they
come off a terminol screen, a i ine or paragraph at a time or, if
downloaded and opened in a setext browser such as Easy Uiew, as
two-ievei outline documents with a cilckabie Index and a variety
of graphic enhancements such as bold and italic text, among others.
Technical details
Technical ly setext is a descriptive, graphic markup languoge,
not some fixed publication or "data format"; many distinct setext
layouts are possible. Rll will share certain common traits, such
as lines folded to below 70 characters' length, named sections
denoted by labels underlined by equal ly-iong lines of dashes,
■"^bold words marked like this^**, .underlined words sandwiched
between underscores, etc, all highly unobtrusive formatting for
human eyes, indeed, this human bios is what distinguishes setext
from other markups, which are nearly always primari ly designed with
mechanical pxirsing efficiency in mind.
This page provides a good approximation on how a setext looks in
monospaced conditions. Vet its de facto "invisible" formatting is
distinct enough to permit it being enhanced by setext browsers,
converters to other formats etc But best of oil. It doesn't take
any special tools to compose se texts by hc»>d. R word processor or
text editor, preferably one with macro capabi 1 1 ties, is oil that is
requ i red .
I, Ion Feldman, < i cnfBrandom.se >, a "Human Foctors thinker and
tinkerer, " designed the setext format during a year-long discussion
that Rdam and I once held on the ways and meons to design electronic
texts optimal ly.
a
Figure 10.4 Example of setext.
It's best to read a setext in a browser such as Akif Eyler's Easy View (primarily a
Macintosh browser, although versions are available for Unix and Windows). Easy View
can replace the awkward underscores and asterisks with bold and underline styles and
can break up a setext into its sections, displaying each subhead separately. But if you can't
or don't want to use a program such as Easy View, any program that can display a text
file will suffice. You can find the latest version of Easy View in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
HTML
I don't want to say much about HTML here, because although it's a text file format that
you may run into on the Internet, I plan to provide a short tutorial on the basics of HTML
so you can create your own Web pages. So, I want to hold off on talking about HTML
until chapter 26, "Creating Your Web Page."
Part II
Note
198 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Graphics Files
For a long time, graphics files weren't commonly posted on the Internet except for use by
users of a specific machine, because Macs were not able to read PC graphic file formats
and vice versa. Now, however, you can view some common formats on multiple plat-
forms.
GIF
First among these formats is G/F, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format. GIF was
originally created by CompuServe. GIF files almost always have the extension .gif. GIF
files are popular on the Internet because the file format is internally compressed, although
it can show only 256 colors. When you open a GIF file in a program such as Giffer or
GraphicConverter, the program expands the GIF file before displaying it.
It seems that almost no one can agree on how to pronounce GIF, either with a hard G sound
or with a J sound. Take your pick; I won't argue ivith you either way.
With the rise of the World Wide Web, two other features of GIF files have become
important — interlacing and transparency.
If you save a GIF file in interlaced format (an option in the shareware GIFConverter, for
example), some Web browsers can bring in the image gradually rather than all at once. In
the current version of MacWeb, the image fades in line by line, with every other line or so
being drawn, then the rest of them appearing on subsequent passes. In Netscape, the
image appears crude and blocky and gradually becomes more detailed. Interlaced GIFs
are useful because the user can stop the image loading or move on if it's a large but
uninteresting image. I personally feel that interlaced GIFs should not be used for text-
heavy graphics or for what are called image maps on the Web — pictures that have differ-
ent hot spots for clicking on. The text-heavy images are disconcertingly hard to read as
they come in, and the image maps don't work until the entire image has appeared, which
can be confusing.
The transparency feature in GIFs also proves useful on the Web. You can't have non-
rectangular graphics on the Web, but you can set one color as "transparent," which means
that the Web browser will interpret that color as being the same as the color of the
browser's background. This enables seemingly nonrectangular graphics and makes using
graphics on Web pages more flexible. A little application from Aaron Giles called Trans-
parency enables you to set a transparent color in GIF images. These and other graphics
utilities are in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Chapter 10 ^ File Formats 199
JPEG
The second type of file format you may see is JPEG, which stands for Joint Photographic
Experts Group. JPEG files, which are generally marked by the .jpeg or .jpg extension, use
a different form of compression than GIF. JPEG file compression reduces the image size to
as much as one-tw^entieth of the original size, but also reduces the quality slightly because
it actually throws out parts of the file that you generally can't see. You can view JPEG files
(among other formats) with JPEGView from Aaron Giles, which is available in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
JPEG files have become more popular on the Internet now that Netscape and the Web
browser in TCP/Connect II 2.1.1 can display JPEG images inline, that is, without running
a program such as JPEGView.
Why would you want to use one format over the other? JPEG images can have more than
256 colors in them and are thus better for photographic images. GIFs tend to be better for
graphics created on the Mac, especially those with only a few colors. And of course, not
all Web browsers can display JPEG images inline yet.
Sound and Video Files
With the advent of the World Wide Web, sound and video files have become far more
conamon on the Internet, although they're so large that most people using a modem won't
want to spend the hours required to download a short sound or video clip. But if you
have either a fast connection or patience, there are several file formats that you should be
aware of.
Sound
Sounds come primarily in the Ulazu format. Files in this format have the . au extension. I
know very little about the Ulaw format except that there are two programs on the Mac
capable of playing it, UlawPlay and SoundMachine, both written by Rod Kennedy. Both
are free and seem to work fine, although SoundMachine has a far more sophisticated
interface. It wouldn't take much — UlawPlay merely accepts a file dropped on it, launches,
plays the file, and quits. You can find both in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Video
There are two video formats that you should know about, MPEG and QuickTime. MPEG
stands for Motion Picture Experts Group. It's actually a compression format much like
JPEG, although one optimized for compressing video rather than still images. MPEG files
generally have the extension . mpeg or . mpg, as you might expect. The only Macintosh
Part II
200 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
program I know of that can play MPEG files is Maynard Handley's free Sparkle. You can
find Sparkle on the Internet at:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
The most common application for playing QuickTime movies is Movie Player (previously
called Simple Player), which comes with the QuickTime distribution from Apple. Many
other applications, such as Leonard Rosenthol's Popcorn, can play QuickTime movies as
well, but Simple Player works sufficiently well for basic QuickTime movies. You can find
it, along with the necessary QuickTime extension, at the following URL (sorry for the
mega-long URL — that's what happens when Apple uses long directory names and buries
things deeply):
f t p : / /ftp . info . apple . com/Apple . Support .Area /Apple . Software . Updates /Macintosh/System . Software /
Other. System. Software/QuickTime. 1 .6.2.sea.hqx
Actually, I lied. There is a third format you may see on occasion, AVI, indicated by the
. avi extension. It's a Windows video format, and although there are no Mac programs
that can play AVI files, there is one that can convert AVI files to QuickTime movies,
called, as you might expect, AVI to QuickTime Converter. It's at the URL below.
There is a quirk about QuickTime movies that may trip up budding Web publishers:
Because of the two Macintosh file forks, you can't just upload a Quick l ime movie to a
Web server. Instead, you must first "flatten" the movie using a utility like the freeware
flattenMoov. It's in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Format's Last Theorem
There you have it, a semiexhaustive (I could have gone into the nitty gritty of each file
format, but then you'd have fallen asleep on me) discussion of the major file formats
you're likely to run into on the Internet and how to deal with them. I think we've had
plenty of background material, so let's move on to figuring out how to choose what sort
of Internet access you want and from whom to get it.
Part
Partial Internet Access
It's time to talk about how you get Internet access and what it looks like. You have
five basic ways to connect to the Internet each with pros and cons, costs and confu-
sions. I try to explain how you choose between them and how to choose a provider
in chapter 11, "Choosing a Connection." Then I discuss Internet access through
commercial online services like America Online or CompuServe in chapter 12,
"Commercial Ser\dces." In chapter 13, "Bulletin Board Systems," I take a brief look
at connecting to the Internet via a BBS, or bulletin board system. After that, chapter
14, "Shell Account Enhancements," looks at some utilities that put a pretty face on
the hoary Unix shell account. The last chapter, chapter 15, "UUCP Access", in this
part is for those who don't want anything other than email and Usenet news. Don't
worry about the terms and acronyms just yet; I explain them in the following
chapters.
All these methods are in some way limited as to what they provide or what they
offer for the future, so Part IV provides all the details related to setting up and using
the fifth method of connecting, a full Internet connection based on MacTCP. I should
be honest about this — I fully expect that you will want a MacTCP-based connection
to the Internet, so that's where I concentrate the most discussion and where the
software on the disk helps. If you have a Delphi account or an account on a First
Class BBS, for instance, the disk is useless to you.
After chapter 11, ''Choosing a Connection," I don't expect you to read all of the
chapters in this section. Frankly, if you plan to get a PPP connection as I recommend,
there's no reason for you to know about UUCP or enhancements to a Unix shell
account. You may still want to read about what the commercial services provide if
you're helping a friend with one, or if you also have an account there, but all that
depends on your situation.
Now let's look at how you choose between the different types of accounts and how
you choose an Internet provider.
Note
Chapter
Choosing a Connection
When the time comes to start thinking about making your first connection to the Internet,
the first question you must answer is, ''Which Internet access provider should I work
with?"
Just so I don't lose anyone, an Internet access provider, also called an Internet setvice
provider or just Internet provider, is a company that you call with a modem to access the
Internet, In the same way that you work with your local telephone company to access the
world-wide telephone system, so too must you work loith an Internet access provider to
access the Inter?iet.
Arriving at the proper answer to that question can be either extremely simple or really
quite difficult. If you live in a place where there is only one local Internet provider, the
answer is quite easy — work with a local provider whenever possible because it's almost
always cheaper to make a local phone call than to call long distance. If you're blessed, or
cursed, with a multitude of Internet providers, the choice becomes more difficult. Al-
though you may have more to choose from, you also have to spend more time figuring
out the differences.
Eliminating Options
However, many people never get to that point, because they're confused by the difference
between accessing the Internet through a commercial service like America Online or
204 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
through a MacTCP-based PPP account with a true Internet provider. Then there are those
people who are trying to decide between a Unix shell account and a MacTCP-based SLIP
or PPP account. And what about the aging UUCP war-horse? But first, let's talk about
what can be the easiest way to get started for many people — the commercial information
services.
Commercial Services
In my opinion, there are only a few reasons to choose a commercial online service like
America Online, CompuServe, or eWorld over a full Internet connection. First, if your
area has a local number for the commercial service, but doesn't yet have a local Internet
provider, the costs of accessing the commercial online service can be somewhat lower
than calling an Internet provider long distance. You may want to read on to see what I
say about how the costs all work out, though, because the commercial online services all
charge you by the hour after a certain number of free hours (or if you use certain services,
and those costs aren't always as up front as they should be). Nonetheless, it's easy to
spend a lot of time on the Internet, and if you've got a local call to America Online, for
instance, the $3.50 per hour that they charge after your free hours will probably be less
than you would pay for a long-distance call anywhere.
The second reason for considering a commercial online service in favor of a real Internet
connection is a bit hard for me to admit, given my obvious Internet biases. Quite frankly,
it's often easier to set up an account with eWorld or America Online than it is to configure
the necessary software to communicate with an Internet provider. For instance, you can
call an 800 number to get a copy of the special software for America Online or eWorld (the
numbers are in the next chapter), and they offer tech support for their software. That said,
I feel that you pay for that initial ease of use (w^hich isn't guaranteed — I've often had those
automated signup processes fail in ways that would confuse a beginner) with software
that simply isn't up to snuff in comparison with what you can get for MacTCP-based
connections.
For instance, I gave my grandmother a Macintosh Classic for Christmas, and my sister
gave her a 2400 bps modem. We got her up on America Online because it was a local call.
Both she and my father, who was helping her, have had quite a lot of trouble with the
way America Online handles nicknames (my father's used to Eudora), and the first
question she sent me after only a few messages was, "How come I can't quote replies like
everyone else can?" Well, the answer is quite simply, "America Online's software doesn't
do that." I don't quite dare introduce my grandmother to utilities that would enable her to
quote replies because they would undoubtedly add to the confusion.
That said, I still feel that America Online was the right choice for her, in large part because
she's not really interested in being on the Internet so much as being able to send and
receive Internet email. That's perhaps the third reason to use a commercial online service
instead of the Internet. If you really aren't all that interested in the Internet and don't plan
Chapter H ♦ Choosing a Connection 205
on spending much time online, you can't beat the commercial ser\dces for a combination
of inexpensive access (as long as you stick within your free hours each month) and
relative ease of use. Since you won't be using the software much, the fact that it may lack
(and I speak for all the commercial services here — their software is for the most part
mediocre) essential features isn't that important.
Finally, the commercial services all offer a great deal of quality information and files to
download. If you have no desire to explore beyond the walls of the commercial service,
then by all means, don't bother! You shouldn't get on the Internet just because someone
said you had to. You should want to get on, because otherwise you'll probably convince
yourself that the Internet is a waste of time. And, you'll be right — for you, the Internet
will be a waste of time.
Bulletin Board Systems
The main reason that I'd recommend using a BBS over a full Internet connection is
because most BBSs are extremely cheap or free. Increasingly, BBSs provide Internet email
and news (often using a UUCP connection. I'll discuss this in a moment), and some are
putting in direct Internet connections that enable you to use services like the World Wide
Web from within the BBS. I expect more of these services will appear in BBS software in
the future.
Because many boards are free, they're also potentially unreliable as well (since the
person running the BBS probably isn't watching it 24 hours a day). That can be a serious
problem if you rely on your Internet connection for business or important personal
communication.
Finding a local BBS can be a daunting task because most communities don't have listings
of them in the newspaper or anywhere else for that matter. The best place to start is at
your dealer or any local computer store. These people can often point you to someone on
the staff who uses bulletin boards, or they may direct you to local user groups, which
often operate bulletin boards.
Unix Shell Accounts
Okay, so you've decided that you do want to get on the Internet after all, but you see that
one provider is offering a connection for much less than another. Why the difference?
Well, in this prefabricated-for-your-convenience example, the first provider only offers a
Unix shell account, whereas the second provider offers full SLIP or PPP access so you can
use MacTCP-based software. Again, I must bare my biases.
I use a Macintosh because I feel that the Macintosh interface is as good as we've got right
now. I won't pretend it's perfect, and I've used plenty of other systems as well. I simply
feel, and if you own a Mac you probably agree with me, that I'd rather use a Macintosh
than type cryptic commands at a command line.
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Well, that's the difference between the Unix shell account and the SLIP or PPP account. If
you have a Unix shell account, you'll end up typing at that command line more than you
like. If you do end up with a shell account, I strongly recommend that you get a different
book because I don't cover how to use Unix at all in this one. I prefer to concentrate on
the Macintosh instead, and to cover two operating systems well would be a tremendous
amount of work. If you decide to take this route, 1 recommend Ed Krol's The Whole
Internet User's Guide and Catalog (O'Reilly & Associates). Ed does a great job of explaining
in detail how to work with the Internet on a Unix machine. Besides, Ed's a great guy, and
he uses a Macintosh PowerBook Duo and Eudora in real life.
However, there is now some software that I'll talk about in chapter 14, "Shell Account
Enliancements," that goes a long way toward giving you SLIP (and soon PPP) access from
a Unix shell account. This software, called TIA, or The Internet Adapter, is an impressive
feat, but that said, I still don't recommend it for the complete novice. It's Unix software
that you must install in your Unix shell account, and there's just enough tricky stuff that
it's not easy for the novice. If you've used Unix before and have done some scripting on
the Macintosh, you'll probably be fine, though, and a TIA-enhanced shell account may be
a great option for you.
Finding a Unix shell account is similar to finding a SLIP or PPP account; although, Phil
Eschallier has compiled a list of sites, called the nixpub list, that focuses on Unix shell
accounts. To receive the latest copy (this assumes you have an email account somewhere
else already, of course), send email to mail-server@bts.com and put get PUB
nixpub.long in the body of the message. The list is approximately 60K.
Also, try calling the help desks at local universities or colleges because some provide
limited access to their machines. If you work at a university or large computer-oriented
business, of course, you probably simply have to ask the right person, so start with the
help desk or the person who takes care of your computers.
UUCP
But what about UUCP? Sure, it's old and slow and limited to email and Usenet news, but
UUCP still has some uses. The main one is for an office with a number of people who only
want to use email. There's no reason to pay for what is almost always a more-expensive
dedicated connection when a cheap UUCP dialup connection will work fine. There are
a number of UUCP gateways for the main LAN email packages like QuickMail and
Microsoft Mail, and once you've got a UUCP connection set up and working, it doesn't
usually require much intervention.
Of course, the real advantage of a UUCP connection via a LAN email package at work is
that someone else may have set it up for you. This type of access also is generally free, but
the only way to find out about it is to ask the person who takes care of your network. I
can't really help you with this type of access because it varies significantly based on how
your network is set up and administered.
Chapter 21 ♦ Choosing a Connection 207
If you're planning on setting up a UUCP connection, be clear on the fact that a UUCP
connection limits you to email and Usenet news, and if you're gatewaying into a LAN
email package, possibly not even Usenet news. You will never be able to use FTP, Gopher,
or the World Wide Web; it's as simple as that.
Because there are relatively few UUCP connections compared to the number of MacTCP-
based connections, you may have a much harder time getting help with any problems on
the nets. Of course, that's an advantage of buying a commercial gateway from a company
like StarNine (info@starnine.com) since they can provide the support.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that UUCP is a good solution for a very specific problem,
but it's not really for the faint of heart or for the person who wants full Internet access.
Setting up and using a MacTCP-based connection will simply be easier and more reward-
ing than a UUCP account for most people.
Finding a site that gives you a UUCP feed is more difficult than finding a Unix shell
account, although the process is similar, especially in terms of consulting the nixpub list.
In my experience, the help desks at universities seldom know about UUCP, even though
Unix machines located in the Computer Science or Engineering departments often
support it. You might ask around to find out who administrates those computers, then
ask nicely whether they provide any UUCP feeds. UUCP is sufficiently efficient that a
long-distance call might make financial sense, especially if you don't subscribe to a large
newsgroup or receive large programs in email.
MacTCP-based Connections
In the previous sections. I've compared, usually negatively, all of the other methods of
connecting to the Internet to a full MacTCP-based connection. I'll be honest — I don't think
anything else compares in terms of power, speed, flexibility, and often, expense.
The combination of PPP or SLIP and MacTCP lets you run great Macintosh programs that
enable you to do everything on the Internet with a Macintosh interface. Gone are the days
of the command line; now you can use programs such as Eudora for email, Anarchie for
FTP, NCSA Telnet, NewsWatcher, InterNews, or Nuntius for reading news, and a slew
of other wonderful applications such as Netscape, MacWeb, TurboGopher, Finger, and
MacWAIS. These programs often work together to provide the most complete Internet
solution that you can get. The freeware and shareware programmers in the Macintosh
Internet world are always the first to come out with the best programs, giving you an
ever-improving interface to the Internet.
Another important fact about MacTCP-based connections is that they offer you choices.
Perhaps you prefer Netscape to MacWeb, or Nuntius to NewsWatcher. With a MacTCP-
based connection, you can make that choice, whereas a commercial service or BBS limits
you to their interface.
Finally, now that PPP and SLIP accounts are becoming rather common, the price for
moderate to heavy Internet users is often less than you'd pay for a commercial service
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208 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
because many Internet providers offer flat-rate accounts. It's the best of both worlds —
great softw^are witliout a clock ticking in the background.
But enough about the differences between these Internet options. I assume from the fact
that you bought this book over one that talks about the commercial services that you are
indeed interested in using the Internet to its fullest, and from that, I can assume that
you're going to want to find an Internet provider. As I said above, I see two main vari-
ables in choosing an Internet provider — cost and service.
Cost
The first and, for most people, most important variable is cost. Unless you have more
money than sense, it's not fun to throw money away unnecessarily. However, it can
sometimes be difficult to determine the actual cost of your connection, especially if the
provider has numerous little charges here and there, and if you have to factor in tele-
phone charges.
Flat-Rate Accounts
The first thing to look for is a flat-rate account, under which you pay a set fee every
month, no matter how much time you spend connected. Some accounts aren't technically
flat-rate, but have such a high upper limit, like 120 hours each month, that they may as
well be flat-rate. If you can get a flat-rate account, do it. They simply can't be beat for most
people, and the lack of stress over how large your next bill will be is well worth it, in my
opinion.
Some providers offer discounts if you pay for several months or even a year in advance— it's
worth asking them if they have any such discount plans zohen you sign up.
Restricted Flat-Rate Accounts
Some flat-rate plans are flat-rate, but come with some reasonable restrictions to prevent
people from abusing the service. For instance. Northwest Nexus has a two-hour-on, two-
hour-off policy that it can enforce if necessary. Without such a policy, it would be easy for
someone to connect and leave the modem connected all day, preventing anyone else from
using that modem at the host. Another restriction you may see is a policy of disconnecting
connections that haven't had any traffic pass over them in a certain number of minutes.
Sometimes this restriction can be a pain because, for instance, I can easily spend longer
than ten minutes reading and then responding to a thoughtful message in Usenet news —
all the time without sending any traffic. If you have problems with a too-short timeout
value, try setting Eudora to check your email every few minutes to force some traffic to go
over the connection.
Chapter II ♦ Choosing a Connection 209
Pseudo Flat-Rate Accounts
A number of providers don't offer straight flat-rate plans, but instead offer flat rates up to
a certain number of hours. So, you may pay $30 for 60 hours of use, or something similar.
After that hourly limit, the provider usually charges a few dollars per hour. Again, this
rate system is designed to make sure that some people don't abuse the system to the
detriment of all the other users. If the provider that you're considering uses such a
system, you may want to ask if there's any way you can check to see if you're close to the
time limit. In addition, 1 recommend asking what the policy is on isolated incidents in
which, say, some emergency happens and you have to leave the computer suddenly
while it's still connected, and it's still connected 12 hours later when you can get back.
Most good providers will simply credit you with the time if it's a one-time occurrence.
Per-Hour Accounts
I seldom recommend accounts that charge you by the hour because I personally find it
very stressful to be continually worrying about the clock ticking off dollars in the back-
ground while I'm working. However, per-hour accounts can make sense for people who
don't use them often because the overall cost is lower than a flat-rate account's monthly
fee. For instance, CompuServe used to use a pricing scheme of $2.50 per month and high
hourly fees, and that's the sort of account I still have. Because I don't use CompuServe
much, that pricing scheme is actually a lot cheaper for me than its current standard
pricing plan, which costs $9.95 per month, even if you don't use it. If you decide to go
with a per-hour pricing plan, pay close attention to your bills so that you can tell if it
makes sense to switch to a different type of account, assuming that's an option.
Other Fees
The most common additional fee charged by Internet access providers is a startup fee
that covers the costs of them adding you to their accounting system and setting up your
account and all that. Startup fees also reduce the number of people who join for a month
or two and then bail out. Most of the time, startup fees are in the $20 to $50 range. Because
you only pay one startup fee, it's not a major way to differentiate between providers.
Although it's less common, some providers charge small amounts for file or email stor-
age, such as SI per megabyte per month. Since you wouldn't normally store files on the
provider's host machine if you use a SLIP or PPP account, the main thing to watch out for
is email, which is always stored on the provider's email server until you call in. The catch
here is that it's possible to set some email programs to leave copies of the mail on the
ser\'er, thus wasting space and potentially racking up charges. Only leave mail on the
server if you know you need to retrieve it again from another machine.
Another reason that you may be charged for storage space is if your provider allows you
to create your own Web page or anonymous FTP directory. If that's true, then you're
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getting some service for your money, so it should be easy to determine if the service is
worth the charge. More on this later, since not all providers offer such services.
Phone Charges
Many people don't think about phone charges properly, which leads to some confusion
about how they interact with any fees charged by an Internet provider.
Almost everyone who wants to make an Internet connection using the software with this
book along with a Mac and modem has a telephone connection that can make local calls
for free (although this is less true in countries other than the U.S.). Thus, a local telephone
call won't add to your bill, which is the main reason why I always recommend that
people work with an Internet provider that offers a local number.
I'm assuming that you knoiv the difference between a local call and a long-distance call.
Long-distance calls don't have to cover a great distance, but if you can normally make local
calls without zvorrying about per minute charges, any call that has per minute charges is by
definition a long-distance call.
Recently, and this will continue to be even more true in the future, some national Internet
providers have sprung up, offering Internet access via existing national or international
netw^orks, like the CompuSer\^e Packet Network and SprintNet, both of which have many
local numbers around the world. This means that even though you don't pay for the
telephone call (a good thing), you usually pay an extra per-hour charge to the Internet
provider. The provider then passes this charge on to the company, CompuServe or Sprint,
that provides the network. As a result, national providers almost always have some \dnd
of per-hour component to their rate systems. You should make sure that it's a good deal
for you before taking it, especially if the per-hour charge is higher than you would pay
calling long distance to a provider with a cheaper rate system — of course, the best ar-
rangement is a cheap flat rate with no charge for the phone call. Also, even though you
can call a local number to access a national Internet provider, that provider's offices
probably aren't anywhere near you, which may make getting support more difficult. I
also like to support local businesses.
Many people live where they can't call an Internet provider locally, nor can they call one
of the packet-switched networks locally. What to do? Well, there are two basic choices.
First, break down and make that long-distance call to an Internet provider that otherwise
has good rates and policies. Second, check out Internet providers that offer connections
via 800 numbers. Let's look at these two options in detail.
Long Distance
Racking up huge long-distance bills goes against the grain for many of us, myself in-
cluded, partly because when I was growing up it was long-distance to call just about
Note
Chapter 22 4 Choosing a Connection 211
anyone we knew. However, now that there's plenty of competition in the long-distance
market, you can choose a long-distance company that provides the best package for the
way you call.
If you just have some basic deal with the long-distance company, it may cost as much as
25c per minute, depending on the time of day that you call. However, if you sign up for
one of the special calling plans, you can significantly reduce that per-minute charge. For
instance, MCI offers a Friends and Family plan that gives a 20 percent discount on calls
that you make after 5:00 P.M. and on weekends, or something like that. If the number
you're calling also is an MCI customer (many providers set up specific numbers for this
purpose), then you get a 40 percent discount. In addition, MCI reportedly has a Best
Friends program that gives you a 40 percent discount on any one number. Sprint and
AT&T undoubtedly have comparable plans, but because the details vary greatly and since
the plans tend to change frequently, you should call to find out what would be best for
you. In addition, small long-distance companies have sprung up that offer creative and
inexpensive packages. Check your Yellow Pages for a list of the less well-known long-
distance providers in your area and compare their prices along with those from the big
guys. I've collected some phone numbers in Table 11.1.
Table 11.1
Long-Distance Telephone Company Customer Service Numbers
Company
Customer Sendee Number
AT&T
800-222-0300
MCI
800-950-5555
Sprint
800-877-4000
In talking with the support people at my provider. Northwest Nexus, I gather that some
Northwest Nexus customers have managed to get long-distance telephone rates as low as
7(t per minute, or $4.20 per hour. It may not be possible for you to get exactly the same
rates, so figure out what the best per-minute charge you can get is, and then multiply that
by 60 to find the per-hour charge. Keep that charge in mind, because you'll want to
compare it to the alternative, calling an 800 number.
One advantage of calling long-distance is that with phone charges more or less the same no
matter which Internet provider you choose, you can pick any provider in the country. That
enables you to base your decision on variables other than cost, such as support, reliability,
and other services.
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800 Numbers
Numbers beginning with the prefix 800 deceive many people because, as we all know,
calling an 800 number is free, right? Well, no. When you call an 800 number, any 800
number, the phone company bills the company on the other end just as they would bill
you for a long-distance charge. In other words, an 800 number is merely a way of revers-
ing the charges.
If you're calling a tech support number or ordering something from a mail-order com-
pany, you probably never see that charge. The company in question merely absorbs it as
a cost of doing business and adds it to the overall pricing structure. However, when you
call an 800 number to connect to an Internet provider, the Internet provider passes the
cost right back to you in the form of a per-hour charge.
There's nothing wrong with this mechanism, but you shouldn't pretend that there's
anything different about it compared with a long-distance call. Either way, the telephone
company makes money for each minute that you stay online. The only difference is that
with a long-distance call, you pay the phone company directly; with an 800 number, you
pay the Internet provider, who then pays the phone company.
The problem comes in the rates. It's pretty easy to get discount rates around lOc per
minute ($6.00 per hour), and as I noted previously, some people have gotten as low as
7c per minute ($4.20 per hour). The lowest I've seen an Internet provider go on an 800
number is $5.50 per hour, and frankly, I don't know how that provider, DataBank, Inc.
(inf o@databank . com) does it, since everyone else charges between $8 and $12 per hour.
All I'm saying here is that you should assemble as much comparative information as you
can before you decide what is or is not the best deal for you. I cannot tell you what's
cheapest because I don't know what all the variables are for you — which long-distance
company and calling plan you use, whether it's cheaper or more expensive to call long-
distance within your state, and so on.
Service
In some ways, making the decision of which provider to use based on cost alone is simple.
You figure out the salient numbers, add them all up, and tiy^ to determine what your
monthly bill will look like. End of story, assuming that one provider stands out over
others. But what if cost isn't the deciding factor? What if you discover that there are three
providers in your area, and they all charge about the same amount (which wouldn't be
surprising, given the demands of local competition in our capitalistic society). That's
when you have to choose based on services. As I said above. I'm assuming here that all
the providers you've narrowed your choice to support PPP or SLIP so you can use
MacTCP-based applications. So what differentiates providers? Reliability (and its cohorts,
accessibility and support) and special services such as personal Web pages and custom
domain names.
Chapter 12 ♦ Choosing a Connection 213
Reliability, Accessibility, and Support
These three topics fit together quite closely and are inherently related to how important
a given Internet provider thinks its customers are. If a provider wants to concentrate on
doing the best possible job for the customer, none of these three should ever be a problem.
But in the real world, trade-offs are made, and in my experience you sometimes get what
you pay for in terms of reliability, accessibility, and support.
Just the other day I corresponded with someone who was having all sorts of problems
with his account. I couldn't see anything wrong in what he was doing, so I recommended
he try another provider that might do things differently. He got an account with tlie other
provider, and everything worked on the first tr}^ I pass on this anecdote because I want to
you to realize that you don't have to put up with a lousy provider, for whatever reason.
You can always switch to a different one (although of course, then you must go through
the decision process of which one to pick again, but hey, you can't have everything!).
Reliability
Reliability is a simple issue, but it's hard to determine before signing up. Do the
provider's machines crash often, and if they do crash, does the provider lose email? Can
you almost always connect to the outside Internet (sometimes such connection problems
aren't your provider's fault, but lie further downstream)? Can you post a message to
Usenet news and be sure that it will make it out to the rest of the world?
These are just a few of the questions that you should periodically ask yourself when
you're working with a provider. You can't know this information beforehand, except
perhaps from talking to an existing customer, and the provider certainly won't tell you
if its setup is unreliable. But problems happen, and if they aren't fixed promptly and
properly, it's tremendously frustrating. The last thing you want to do is start using a
provider in your home-based business, say, and then find out that because of a technical
glitch all the email to your account bounced for a week while you were on vacation.
Accessibility
Although it may seem as though I covered accessibility previously. I'm thinking of a more
specific issue. This is a simple question. Can you almost always get through to your
provider's modems whenever you want to? There's nothing worse than getting a busy
signal for hours on end, even with automatic redial. And it's even worse when your
provider has bad modems that just ring and ring and ring and...
Busy signals are a fact of life with any provider. The reason is simple. No provider could
possibly afford to have one modem and one phone per customer without charging
exorbitant rates. Every provider tries to maintain a balance, then, between the number of
customers and the number of modems and phone lines. This balance requires that you get
busy signals occasionally when you call at the busiest times of night, for instance, after
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214 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
dinner. Otherwise, the provider would be paying for phone lines and modems that would
sit unused for the rest of the day — an obvious waste of money.
As providers grow, they must continually add modems and phone lines, and sometimes
it can take the phone company a week longer than expected to fill the order for more
phone lines. Thus, it's acceptable for a provider to have even bad busy signal problems as
long as it's only for a short period of time and those phone lines are on order. If busy
signals are a chronic problem, especially at odd times of the day, get a different provider.
You can't learn to live on the Internet if you have to spend 30 minutes waiting for a free
modem.
Support
Finally, let's face it. The world is not a perfect place, and problems occur. Heck, they occur
all the time. But what's important is that the provider will go out of its way to fix the
problems promptly, help you when you send email or call, and generally is responsive
and responsible.
Technical support is a tremendously hard and stressful job, so not all providers have
equally good support staffs, but a provider that wants happy customers will make sure to
hire quality support folks.
Another thing to check for is a provider that will inform its customers of known down-
time through a mailing list, newsgroup, or login message. It's not nearly as big a deal to
not use your account if you know in advance that you can't do so between 12:00 and 1:00
in the afternoon on a specific day.
Finally, if you're using a national provider, you should check on the hours it offers tech
support, just in case you happen to be on the opposite coast and can't get support when
you may need it. In my experience, local providers generally offer more accessible and
better support, perhaps in part because they're not attempting to serve so many people
from so many places.
Special Services
It's hard for me to anticipate what sort of special services an Internet provider might offer,
but here are a few that I've seen in the past. In my experience, a smaller, local provider is
more likely to be flexible enough to offer these sorts of special services than a large
national provider (although exceptions certainly exist in both directions).
Custom Domain Names
Many people prefer to have a custom domain name instead of the name of the provider's
domain, and some providers can help you get such a name. You can't just pick any name,
such as ibm . com, because most of the obvious ones have already been taken, but some
providers can search for free names from your list and apply for the name for you. Then,
Chapter 22 ♦ Choosing a Connection 215
unless you get a dedicated connecrion or move to another provider, that domain name
points to your provider's computers.
It's often easier for providers to give out domain names under their domain. So for
instance. Northwest Nexus controls the wa.com domain, and can provide domain names
under that domain (which is merely an alias to another machine) quite easily. My friend
Bill got his domain name, beer . wa . com, that way. These subdomain names are easier to
get because the provider doesn't have to ask the InterNIC for them, but they also aren't
portable to another provider.
Personal Web Pages
In this day and age of the World Wide Web, it seems that everyone wants to have his or
her own Web page. It's not that hard to create one in HTML (in fact. I'll show you how in
chapter 26), but finding a server that will carry it can be a bit difficult. This is another area
in which good Internet providers can distinguish themselves. Some may charge a small
monthly fee for such a service, but it may be well worth the cost, depending on how badly
you want your own Web page.
Personal FTP Directory
As with personal Web pages, it can be handy to have a directory on an anonymous FTP
server if you want to put files there for anyone in the world to retrieve. Some providers
offer this, and as with the Web pages, some charge extra.
Email Aliases
Although many providers would ask you to get two accounts if you want to let your
spouse or children use the Internet on their own, some providers can set up email aliases
if you just want to have another email address that comes into the same mailbox as your
standard address. So, for instance, you may have your personal account and have a
company name email address that is an alias to your personal account.
New Connection Methods
ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network — a digital phone line) may not be as wide-
spread as everyone would like, and in some areas it can be both hard to find and expen-
sive when you do find it. But, if you can get an ISDN connection to your house for a
reasonable rate, it would be good if your Internet provider supported it. The same goes
for new modem standards, cable modems, and the like. Is your provider going to keep up
with new technology so you can connect to the Internet at the fastest possible speed?
Similarly, although this isn't that important right away, if you decide to move up to a
dedicated connection via a frame relay 56K line, for instance, can your provider help you?
If so, that makes the move much easier than if you have to find a new provider for your
dedicated connection.
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216 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Custom Information
Most Internet providers concentrate on providing access to the Internet rather than
providing information on the Internet, but many of them also put together Web pages
about events or issues of local interest. I don't consider this a major reason to go with one
provider over another, since you can generally get to any such public site, but it may be
worth supporting if you find the information truly useful.
Business Services
What if you want to set up a small mailing list or run a Gopher server or something like
that, but you don't want to get your own dedicated connection? Some providers offer this
sort of service, although always with additional charges. If you're considering using the
Internet as a business tool but aren't interested in running your own machine to do so,
you might ask around about what sorts of services your provider can give you.
Taking the Plunge
I hope this discussion has given you the information that you need to make an informed
choice among the many different Internet service providers out there. Check out appendix
A, "Internet Starter Kit Providers," for a list of providers that you can easily use with the
custom installation options included on the disk, and appendix B, "Providers of Commer-
cial Internet Access," for a much larger list of providers and their contact information.
The providers listed in appendix A, "Internet Starter Kit Providers," will be easier to work
with than the ones listed in appendix B, "Providers of Commercial Internet Access," if
only because we've included configuration files on the disk for those listed in appendix A.
In addition, they have agreed to give Internet Starter Kit readers specials deals on their
services.
Even if you've decided to get a full Internet account, many people also have accounts on
the commercial services, and that's where I turn my attention in the next chapter.
Note
Commercial Services
For many people, the easiest way to access the Internet, although a limited one, is to use a
commercial online service, such as CompuServe, America Online, or eWorld. The com-
mercial online services provide their own fee-based services such as email, computer and
non-computer related discussions, file libraries, and databases of information. And, just to
ward off this question right away, no, you cannot access files or databases on a commer-
cial service via a normal Internet account. If you could, then the commercial service
couldn't squeeze any nickels from you, and what fun would that be?
You can access some of the commercial sendees over the Internet instead of over a modem,
but this still requires you to have an account on that sendee.
Commercial services offer two main advantages over finding a real Internet access
provider. First, because they have deals with international commercial network carriers
such as SprintNet, finding a local phone number is usually easier. But, you pay for that
easier access, usually with the connect-time fee for the commercial service. Second, the
commercial services find it easier to offer commercial-quality information, because they
can charge users to access that information and then pay the information provider. Hence
you find, for example, full-text databases of computer magazines on CompuServe, but
you pay extra for any searches in those databases, with the revenue going to the magazine
publishers. Remember, to paraphrase the Bard, "All the world's a marketing scheme."
Note
218 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
All the commercial services have Internet email gateways, which means that you can use
these services to send and receive Internet email. They also have started to add other
Internet services, like Usenet news, FTP, Telnet, and Gopher. Some place additional
restrictions on email, such as limiting the size of files you can receive, or charging extra
for Internet email (as opposed to internal email on that service).
Absolutely none of the commercial online services properly handle quoting for email. When
offering quoting at all, they, like AppleLink, append the original letter to your reply, which
makes it difficult to refer to different parts of the original in context If you use any of these
services and aren't happy with the lack of decent facilities, try Rick Holzgrafe's
SignatureQuote (see capsule review later in the chapter).
In this chapter, I concentrate on the major commercial services for Macintosh users —
America Online, CompuServe, and eWorld — and briefly look at some other, less-
commonly used services — AppleLink, BIX, Delphi, GEnie, Outland, and Prodigy. Keep in
mind that rates change frequently on these services, to accommodate market pressures
and the marketing whim of the day, so the rates I give throughout may not always be
accurate.
Having an account on one of the commercial services can be a good way to ease into the
Internet because you can send and receive email. Being able to send and receive email
enables you to request automated information from the major Internet providers, which
makes finding a local connection much easier. In addition, many of the online services
provide decent graphical interfaces that are easier to use than character-based interfaces.
Before I get into specifics, take a look at Table 12.1 which summarizes the syntax for
sending email between the Internet and many of the commercial online services, includ-
ing some not mentioned here because they're not used by Mac users or because they're
really ugly or expensive.
Table 12.1
Commercial Online Service Addressing"**
Service To the Internet From the Internet
America Online
AppleLink
BIX
CompuServe
Delphi
eWorld
user@internet.com
user@internet . com@internet#
user@lnternet.com
>INTERNET: user@internet.com
user@internet . com
user@lnternet.com
user@aol.com
user@applelink . apple . com
user@bix.com
77777 . 777@compuserve . com
user@delphi.com
user@eworld.com
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 219
Service
To the Internet
From the Internet
GEnie
user@internet . com@inet#
user@genie . geis . com
MCI Mail
user@internet . com
user@mcimail.com
Prodigy
user@internet . com
user@prodigy.com
*Nolc: none of these are real addresses— substitute the username for "user" and the fidl domain name for
"internet.com" as in ace@tidbits.com.
America Online
America Online (see figure 12.1), commonly known as AOL, has been around only since
1989 but has always boasted one of the best graphical interfaces for browsing files and
sending email. The way its software handles discussions, however, leaves much to be
desired.
; Screen name: IfldamEngst ▼[
Get Local ^
Home
. .
s/TCP Connection
Figure 12.1 America Online Welcome Window, set for TCP Connection.
In the spring of 1992, AOL opened an Internet gateway, and its popularity grew quickly.
In early 1994, AOL added additional Internet services, including access to Usenet
newsgroups and limited access to some Gopher and WAIS servers. In the summer of
1994, AOL added TCP/IP connections that enable you to connect to AOL over an Internet
Part III
Note N o t e
220 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
connection and run the America Online software at the same time as other MacTCP-based
programs. Connecting to AOL via the Internet requires version 2.5.1 or later of the
America Online software.
The term "America Online" refers to both the service and to the special software they provide
for accessing the service. Sorry if it's confusing.
There are rumors afoot as I write this that America Online will be creating some sort of
ancillary Internet access service, although no details are available. In late 1994, AOL spent
$35 million on a company called ANS (Advanced Network & Services), the company that
had managed and operated the NSFnet Backbone Service since 1990. The ANS backbone
network is among the largest and fastest public data networks. AOL's acquisition of ANS
followed on the heels of two other Internet-related acquisitions, BookLink Technologies
and NaviSoft, and AOL may use technology from those two companies to provide
Internet client software.
Internet Connections
As I said, you can now connect to America Online over the Internet if you have MacTCP-
based Internet access, either through a network or through SLIP or PPP. Of course, this
does you no good if you don't already have an AOL account. You can sign up online if
you download the AOL software from:
ftp://ftp.aol.com/mac/
Once you download the archive, you end up with an installer that puts everything in the
right places automatically. Then, from the Locality pop-up menu, you choose TCP Con-
nection.
Although the TCP Connection script comes hard-coded to use the TCPack Telnet tool, with a
properly written script you can use a different Telnet tool Why would you want to? Choice.
It's The American Way'"'.
Once you have everything configured correctly, make sure you're properly connected to
the Internet (if you use SLIP or PPP), and then click America Online's Sign On button. The
login process proceeds normally, but because you've already made the connection to the
Internet, it's a bit faster. After you're on, everything works pretty much as normal. Over a
14,400 bps PPP connection, the speed was not significantly different from the normal
9,600 bps modem connection I used to use with AOL. Overall, I found reliability better
with the Internet connection, but I've had major communications trouble with AOL, so I
may not be a good judge.
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Sewices 221
I see several advantages to using the Internet access method over the normal modem
connection. Many people may only have Internet access at work, so connecting from there
is not only possible, but much faster if you have a fast Internet connection. In other cases,
Internet access may be cheaper if you must otherwise call AOL long distance (the actual
cost of using AOL is the same no matter how you connect). Also, because of the standard
way Macintosh Internet programs work, you can use any number of them simulta-
neously. This simply isn't possible if one application hogs the modem, as is normal with
AOL. Finally, Internet access makes it far easier for non-U.S. users to connect.
What are the disadvantages to connecting to AOL over the Internet as opposed to a
normal modem connection? There are a lot of access numbers for AOL around the U.S.,
certainly more than Internet access numbers. If that's true in your area, there may be no
reason to bother with the Internet access. But enough about the connection. On to the
Internet services that AOL provides.
Internet Services
I may have quibbles with the way they implement things, or how long they take to do so,
but AOL deserves major points for providing as much access to the Internet as they do.
You can go to the Internet Connection (see figure 12.2) to read more about it from any-
where on AOL by choosing Keyword from the Go To menu. In the Keyword dialog box,
type Internet and press Return. There's also an Internet Connection button in AOL's Main
Menu window.
D Uhat Is the Internet?
Cn Zen & the Rrt of Internet
tl Elec. Frontier Foundation
D CoSN
D Ulred tlogozlne
Cj hoc Communications Forum
PC Communications Forum
Q Internet Message Board
Oophf r &
VAIS DiUbasts
MifUng
Lists
FTP
VW: Coming Soon!
Figure 12.2 America Online Internet Connection.
Note
222 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The problem with using AOL for all of your Internet activities is that you're limited by
what's available. For instance, until AOL adds support for a Web browser (which should
be in the summer of 1995), you won't be able to access anything on the World Wide Web.
And, even if AOL does eventually support everything you can do on the Internet, the best
software for using the Internet will always appear first for MacTCP-based connections.
The feature that I most want from AOL, and which thexfve promised, is the capability to
forward all of my email to my Internet address.
Email
America Online's Internet email gateway is easy to use, due to AOL's simple interface for
sending email. If you can send email on America Online to another AOL user, you can
send email to anyone on the Internet with no additional work. In addition, AOL makes it
relatively easy to send email to a number of people all at once for the same amount of
connect time that you might spend to send the message to one person. Simply put mul-
tiple addresses in the To and/or CC fields, and your message goes to all of them (see
figure 12.3).
Figure 123 America Online Mail window.
Note
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 223
Although they seem somewhat apologetic about not doing so, AOL doesn't reformat
incoming Internet email. This means that you may have to expand the size of your email
window to accommodate the longer line lengths that Internet email tends to have. An
advantage of not reformatting incoming email is that to do so would undoubtedly destroy
most ASCII graphics and hand-coded ASCII tables.
If you mainly receive Internet email on AOL, you may want to stick with a monospaced font
such as Monaco or Courier for viewing your email, because proportionally spaced fonts such
as Times and Helvetica won't work ivith ASCII tables.
To send email from America Online to the Internet, you don't have to do anything special.
Simply type the Internet address in the To field, and fill in the Subject field and the body
of the message as you do when sending email to another AOL user.
To send email from the Internet to a user on AOL, you must remember a few simple rules.
First, you need to know the person's username. Second, type the username in lowercase
letters, because some email packages on the Internet are picky about upper- and lower-
case. Third, remove any spaces in the name. Fourth, append an @ and the machine name
and domain to the end of the address; for AOL, it's aol. com. For example, my username
on AOL is Adam Engst. To send email from the Internet to my AOL account, you would
address your message to adamengst@aol.com.
In the Internet Connection, clicking on the Mailing Lists button presents you with a
window of information about mailing lists (see figure 12.4), and, most importantly, a
button called Search Mailing Lists. It's essentially a simple search in the List of Lists, and
AOL thoughtfully provided a Compose Mail button for subscribing on the spot. Had they
also created a mailing list subscription manager which would handle all your subscrip-
tions and provide single-click access to the standard mailing list function, it would have
been truly impressive.
If you plan to use AOL for serious Internet email, let me dissuade you somewhat. AOL
limits the size of outgoing mail to the amount of text that can fit in its softw^are's message
box. According to my testing, that's exactly 24,000 characters. You cannot send attached
files through the gateway (it's technically feasible, but would increase the traffic signifi-
cantly), and AOL splits large email messages that come in from the Internet at about 25K
each. (This file splitting is actually a major advance for America Online. In the past, it
truncated incoming messages at 27K, which was a major headache for many people.)
Finally, although you can type special characters such as the bullet (•) or the trademark
symbol C) in the AOL email window, the Internet gateway software replaces some special
characters with reasonable replacements, and others with spaces or nonsensical replace-
ments. It would be far better if it did an intelligent replacement, so the trademark sign
was converted to something like [tm].
« Services
Part
Note
224
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Internet Mailing Lists
D
Uhat fire Hoi
1 ing Lists?
D
Flndl® a da
1 1 l«B L 1 at
D
Please Read:
danagi ng Vour dai 1
D
Houi to Join
a List
D
Receiving da
i 1 from a List
D
Post Ing ria 1 1
to a List
D
Houj to Leave
a L i st
Keyword: Mailing Liata
Search
Mailing Lists
Compose
Mail
Figure 12A America Online Internet Mailing Lists window.
Interestingly, it's hard to tell how long it takes for messages to travel to and from AOL. I
sent my AOL account a message from my Internet account, and a few minutes later, sent my
Internet account a message from my AOL account. The message from AOL to the Internet
was delivered essentially instantly. It took about half an hour for the Internet message to
arrive at AOL, Go figure.
Although AOL's software is fine for a message or two a day, if you anticipate joining a
mailing list that could generate up to 30 messages a day (wliich is easily possible), its
interface for reading mail can quickly make your life miserable. AOL opens messages
slowly, and makes you confirm your actions when you delete a message or reply to a
message offline. I gather that your mailbox can only hold 500 messages, which may seem
like a lot, but if you participate in a few high-volume mailing lists and then go on vaca-
tion, it's not unthinkable that your mailbox would fill up. Mail that you've read is deleted
from your online mailbox in a week; unread mail sticks around for five weeks before
being deleted automatically.
Although I believe they have fixed most of the problems, AOL has developed a reputation
for having vaguely flaky connections. As a result, sometimes Internet email arrives
immediately, whereas other times something delays it for up to several days. This prob-
lem isn't serious for the casual email user. It can quickly become frustrating, however, if
you're having a conversation with someone via email or depend on your email for
business reasons.
Overall, I find AOL's email to be sufficiently clunky such that I don't use it any more. I
can get away with this, and you can too, by using a clever program called MailConverter.
Chapter 22 ♦ Commercial Services 225
If you set AOL to download all your new mail via a FlashSession, MailConverter can read
in all the messages in the AOL mail folder for your screen name and convert it into a
Eudora mailbox, translating the addresses into Internet format addresses along the way.
Another option which isn't quite available yet is a commercial program called Emailer
from Claris, which can connect to a number of commercial online services and download
messages into a single In box. More on Emailer and MailConverter later in the chapter.
Usenet News
Along with email, America Online provides access to Usenet news. Although the interface
provided for reading news works, it's about as bare bones as you get. When you click on
the Newsgroups button in the Internet Connection window, you see the Newsgroups
window (see figure 12.5), complete with handy buttons. These enable you to read the
newsgroups you've subscribed to, add more newsgroups to your subscription list, check
new newsgroups, and search through the list of newsgroups for those that might interest
you. Perhaps most interesting to those of us who have used the Internet is the Set Prefer-
ences button, which enables you to set the sort order of the article listings, enter a signa-
ture to be appended to your posts, and see the newsgroup names in the "correct" style as
opposed to the confusing "expanded" names that AOL has assigned to many of the
newsgroups.
ifai
Neujsgroups
Newsgroups
1 D About Neiusgroups
0 IMPORTflHT: Please Read
m
D Neuisgroups Terms of Seruice
; ;i:
D About Aead tly Nemsgroups
iji ;
D How to Add Hewsgroups
iii •
D How to Aemoue Newsgroups
•r :
D How to Locate FAQs
D Getting the Latest Newsgroups
! it
D How to Head Newsgroups
D Using Expert Add
1
Keyword: News^oups
Read My
Newsgroups
Add Expert
Newsgroups Add
a
Search All
Newsgroups
A=r.0
Set
Preferences
Figure 12.5 America Online Newsgroups window.
AOL does a decent job of displaying the newsgroups and opening a new window for each
level of hierarchy, although it's very slow to bring in large lists.
Note
226 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If AOL makes you wait for a very long list to come in, feel free to press K-period to cancel
the loading process. You zoon't see anything that hadn't come in, of course, but there may be
plenty of items in the list to explore.
Moreover, I find it extremely irritating to have to constantly click the More button when
AOL doesn't list all of the items in a hierarchy. This is a major problem with how AOL
handles lists in general, so I doubt it will be fixed any time soon. Being able to search for
newsgroups is also useful, although both the basic list and the search feature limit the
results to newsgroups that AOL finds "acceptable." If you wish to read any "unaccept-
able" newsgroups (most of the alt . sex hierarchy falls into this category, although there
are other sex-related groups that slip through), click on the Expert Add button in the
Newsgroups window and type in the name of the group you want to read.
Using Expert Add is the fastest way to subscribe to newsgroups, although most people
will probably just use the Add Newsgroups button and browse through the lists of
groups, clicking on the Add button when they see an interesting one (see figure 12.6).
rec.bicycies - Nemsgroups
SCI
tnt»rnf t N«m»s
Newsgroups
Subjects
rec . b 1 c m'’ I es . marl. el p 1 ace
3030
O
pec.blcycie9.ml3c
2013
nec. bi eye 1 ea. racing
2400
rec. bicycles. ridea
1129
rec.blcycle9.90c
945
rec.bicycies. tech
3030
1 List Subjects ]| [ Read Messages j
[ Add J
1 1 1 ? ] r-
Figure 12.6 List of bicycle groups available on AOL.
Once you've subscribed to a few newsgroups (and AOL subscribes everyone to a few
newsgroups), click the Read My Newsgroups button to see to which groups you are
subscribed (see figure 12.7).
The buttons here are fairly obvious. List Unread (or double-clicking on a group name)
opens the group and lists the messages you haven't yet read; List All lists all the mes-
sages; Mark Read marks all the messages in the selected group as read; Remove
unsubscribes you from the selected newsgroup; More displays any groups that aren't yet
showing; and the ? button displays help.
Chapter 12 ^ Commercial Services
227
Read My Nemsgroups
hETilAMI
Internet Names
My Newsgroups
Mark All Newsgroups Read
Unread Total
ao 1 . newsgroups .help
129
129
00 1 . newsgroups . he 1 p . b 1 nor 1 es
H7
117
00 1 . newsgroups . suggest i ons
517
517
00 1 . newsgroups .lest
2067
2067
news . onnounce . newusers
10
10
news. answers
1970
1978
news . groups . reu 1 ews
3
3
rec . oquor i o
3270
3270
rec. bicycles. rides
1129
1129
rec. humor . funny
60
60
^Ust_Unreo^ [ List nil | [Mark Read| [ Remoue | [ Moi o | p?~]
Ml
Figure 12.7 AOL Read My Nezusgroups window.
After you open the list of the messages in a group, double-click on a message title or click
the Read button to read the messages in a thread. It's good that AOL groups messages in
a thread, and 1 like being able to sort them alphabetically. Although there is no method of
easily marking which threads to read and which to kill, because you can only select one
thread at a time. Similarly, when you get into the actual newsreader, all you can do is
move forward and backward one article, mark an article as unread, or send a new mes-
sage to the group or to the author. We're not talking a particularly impressive interface
here (see figure 12.8).
But enough ragging on AOL's Usenet interface. It works, it's somewhat graphical, and
AOL is more accessible than Internet providers for many people. If you're only used to
AOL, or are new to the whole shooting match, please read the new^sgroup
news . announce . newusers.
FTP
AOL's FTP client has some interesting features that set it apart, although it also suffers
from AOL's overly window-based interface and the fact that it can only download, not
upload. Once you tunnel into the FTP area by clicking on the FTP button in the Internet
Connection, you get a window that provides buttons for using FTP or for searching a
somewhat limited set of FTP sites on some keywords. Although useful, the search didn't
turn up nearly as many sites as it should have in an ideal world when I searched on
"apple.com".
Nevertheless, when you click the Go To FTP button, AOL presents you with a short list of
popular sites (see figure 12.9) that it mirrors, which means that AOL keeps a copy of the
files from those sites locally to reduce Internet traffic and load on those machines.
Part III
228 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Send New Message
Message 1 of 1 Subject 10 of 21
Subject: Try ouer In Idaho
From: scottecannon.cs.usu.edu < Scott Cannon)
Date: Sat, 1 fipr 95 19:30:03 EST
m
Message- ID: < S806 . 239e®c larlnet.com>
1 heard this at a meeting where a Utah potato farmer was speaking;
i 1
iipii
fl restaurant called an potato supplier and asked for 100 lb of
.
their biggest potatoes.
The supplier said “sorry, we don’t cut up a potato for anybody”.
[ <-Phor Message |
1 1
[ More ]
1 1
[ NeHt Message-> ]
Mark Unread ] [ Reply ] [ Reply to Author | pT]
Figure 12.8 A minimalist interface.
Rnonymous FTP
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Select a FTP site from the Favorite Sites
menu or click Other Site to connect to a
site of your choice.
Favorite Sites
ftp.cico. Indiana. edu:/pub
aumex-a I in , si an f ord . edu ; / 1 n f o-nac
rt fn.nl t .edu:/pub
nac . arch I ue . ura i ch . edu
f 1 p . neuada . edu : /pub/gu 1 1 an
ftp.aol .corn
oak.oakland.edu
ft P* info.npple.con
ftp.borland.com
ftp.rolcrosoft .com
|^_^onnectJ [ Other Site | [ ? |
Hi
Figure 12.9 AOL FTP Favorite Sites.
Chapter 12 ^ Commercial Services 229
Although this list of favorite sites is fairly short, you can connect to any other site by
clicking the Other Site button and entering the FTP site's name. You also can enter full
FTP URLs in the Other Site window to navigate all the way into an FTP site, although
you cannot enter a URL that specifies a file — the URL must end in a directory name only,
such as:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/
In either case, once you connect to a site, you see a dialog displaying whatever message
that site sends out to all who connect, and then a window listing all the files in the default
directory. Files are sorted alphabetically, and there is no way to change that. Dates, file
sizes, and little icons are provided for each entry, so you can tell when a file was up-
loaded, how large it is, and if it's a file or a folder or the equivalent of an alias in Unix (a
little squiggly icon, according to AOL's help — I haven't seen one yet).
Now, the most interesting part of AOL's FTP client is that when you actually retrieve a
file by clicking the Download Now button (see figure 12.10), AOL first retrieves it from
the Internet site (assuming you're not using one of the AOL mirror sites), and once it's on
AOL's machines, proceeds to download it to your Mac.
sumeH-oim.stanford.edu
/info-moc/Anti Virus
Uploaded;
Filename:
Byte Size:
0
0*1/09/95 00ulr-ab3lract3.txt
17H5 O
0
07/09/91 00ahat-to-u3e . 1x1
1359 i
0
10/01/9*1 a-loa3l-to-dl3lnfeclanl .1x1
45961 li
0
08/25/93 alt0rnale-3am-35-ln3lal 1 .hqx
7340 i
13
0*1/07/95 dj 5infeclanl-36.li j
2H-190 II
[0
11/13/93 golekeeper-130.hqx
322280
Op»n
Mor*
Downto*d
Nov
f
H#1p
Dolunlooding *'disinfectant-36.hqH”
Time Remaining: about a minute
I Finish Loter |
Figure 12.10 AOL FTP file downloading.
Services
Part
Note
230 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Note the Finish Later button. Because AOL has downloaded this file, Disinfectant, in my
example, to an AOL machine before letting me download it to my Mac, I can click the
Finish Later button to put the download process in my Download Manager (located in
the File menu) and finish the download at a later time, even during an automated
FlashSession. I've never seen any other FTP client allow for interrupting and resuming
downloads, so this is a welcome feature. Why sit tlirough a long file download when it
can happen when you're off doing something, anything, else?
If you connect to a site that requires a userid and passivord (lohich is possible) via AOL and
download a file that contains sensitive mformation, remember that your file exists on AOL's
machines, at least temporarily, and for the truly paranoid, that might be unacceptable.
Overall, AOL's FTP client is clunky, but useful, and it's extremely handy to be able to use
it while getting files from the Internet for setting up an Internet connection. I would like to
see it offer multiple connections at the same time like Anarchie does now, so that you
could work on more than one site at a time rather than being forced to sit and wait for
AOL to retrieve the file and then start downloading it to your Mac. One easily added
feature would be to turn FTP into a batch operation — let the user basically mark a file for
downloading later, and have it come in via the next automated FlashSession.
Gopher and WAIS
Along with its other Internet services, AOL provides limited access to Gopher servers and
WAIS sources. Once again, I'm not all that impressed with the interface AOL provides,
compared to the MacTCP-based clients for Gopher and WAIS. Clicking the Gopher &
WAIS Databases button in the Internet Connection window brings up the Gopher and
WAIS window, which contains a number of top-level topics. Delving into the topics that
America Online presents is much like working with a normal Gopher server, with WAIS
and searchable Gopher items represented by little book icons (see figure 12.11).
There are several major limitations to AOL's implementation of WAIS, and — somewhat
more so — Gopher. Most importantly, you can only retrieve text items. There is simply no
way to download a file of any other type, such as a JPEG or GIF picture, as far as I can see.
I'm also bothered by the selection of Gopher and WAIS items that AOL includes. There's
nothing wrong with it, but they make it downright difficult to get out to the normal Other
Gopher and Information Servers item that you can easily access with TurboGopher. Scroll
all the way down to the bottom of the Gopher and WAIS window to the Other Gophers
item. Double-click on it to open its window. But that's not it, yet. Finally, click the More
"Other Gopher" button to bring up the More "Other Gopher" Resources window. It
shows you the full geographical hierarchy of Gopher servers that can be handy for
finding a new Gopher server.
Note
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 231
Gopher and LUflIS
Computing
Computing
Editor’s Choices:
CD Computer Info from Around the Network
Computer Info from Around the Netujork
Computer Info from Around the
Q About this dlnectonH
It
QQ Academic Electronic Forums
CD Computer Information from Utlinn
D InterNIC: network registraton, directory and ...
n i see 1 1 aneous computer documentation and disc...
Ld Networks and networked Information tools
tD Software and how to find it
t] Sun computer documentation and discussions
7 \
%
About Computing
Resources
More Computing
Resources
O
[ More I
J1
Figure 12.11 Gophering on America Online.
Luckily, using Veronica to find something isn't nearly so hard, because there's a Search
All Gophers button on the main Gopher and WAIS window that brings up a search
window for searching with Veronica, AOL has set up a private Veronica server so re-
sponse is generally pretty good, although I had trouble finding some Gopher sites that I
know are present (see figure 12.12).
You can even use the -tsuntches that limit the search results to certain types of information.
Use -tl to limit the results to directories, and -t7 to limit the results to searchable items.
My main irritation with America Online's Veronica, and with the Gopher interface in
general, is the slow speed, although I would also like to be able to enter a Gopher address
or URL directly, rather than schlepping through all the lists and windows.
Part III
232
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
101
Search all Gophers mith Ueronica
Search all Gophers with Veronica
Type words that describe what you are looking for, then click Search. Click Help& Info
for more instructions.
[ dictionary -1^"
Items 1 -20 of 1 06 matching entries
09 Uebster's Dictionary
09 Deoil'd Dictionary Search
09 Uebster's Dictionary
Search Dlctionafli of Parrot Hawes
09 Rmerican English Dictionary
09 Search The Jargon Dictionary
09 List """highlight (more mords) — Engiish to Chinese D.
|_JearchJ [ More | [ Help & Info
jH
Figure 12.12 America Online Searching in Veronica.
World Wide Web
Unfortunately, there's not much to say about using the Web via AOL until the next
version of the sofhvare is released. Once that version, 2.6, comes out, you will be able to
browse the Web via AOL as well, and that may make the Internet experience via AOL
significantly more compelling. Tune in next edition for the next installment of As AOL
Turns.
I was able to take a look at the new beta literally on the day I had to turn in the final
version of this chapter. I can't say much about what will change in the AOL 2.6 client, but
it turns out that AOL is implementing Web access via a separate program called Web
Browser, which is essentially the Web module from InterCon's TCP/ Connect II (see
chapter 28, "Integrated Programs" for more details about how the program works since it
really is the same code). Unfortunately, the performance was awful while browsing the
Web via Web Browser, so I hope that AOL will speed it up significantly by the time it
comes out. Feature-wise, Web Browser is quite good, and even includes the mediocre FTP
features and rather slick Gopher features included in TCP /Connect II.
Charges & Connecting
Unlike CompuServe, America Online doesn't charge for internal email or for email that
goes in or out through their Internet gateway. In addition, AOL has reasonable monthly
base rates of $9.95 for the first five hours and $2.95 per hour for each hour after that. You
can sometimes get special sign-up deals that offer even more free time for the first month.
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 233
You need America Online's special software to log on to the service, but they distribute it
for free. Simply call 800-827-6364, and ask them to send you the software. Alternatively, if
you have a friend who already uses AOL, that person can ask AOL to send you the
software, and she receives some free time online when you first log on.
If you have an account somewhere that enables you to send Internet email, you can send
email to joinaol@aol.com and ask for a free AOL software kit, or, if you have FTP access,
it's available for downloading in:
ftp://ftp.aol.com/mac/
CompuServe
CompuServe is one of the oldest of the commercial online services, and until recently,
it has moved relatively sluggishly to provide Internet services. It had one of the first
Internet email gateways, but only added access to Usenet news, FTP, and Telnet some-
what recently.
In a more astonishing move, however, CompuServe recently spent $100 million for Spry,
a developer of Windows Internet software that used the CompuServe Packet Network to
provide full TCP-based Internet access for Windows users. With that hefty purchase,
CompuServe suddenly became a full Internet provider via a PPP account, although only
Windows users can take advantage of the software CompuServe provides, since it comes
from Spry.
CompuServe provides a number of forums for discussing Internet issues (GO INTERNET
to get to them), although they seem to concentrate on Windows topics and software, so
you may want to check out a couple of other places where people talk about Macs on the
Internet. In the Mac Communications forum (GO M ACCOM) there's a section for "Macs
on Internet," but a more useful place is in ZiffNet/Mac, which runs on CompuServe's
machines. It does cost an additional $3.50 per month (same connect time charges), but the
Internet Help section in the ZiffNet/Mac Download and Tech Support (GO
ZMCiDOWNTECH) forum is a good place to ask questions.
CompuServe via PPP
I don't want to get into the details of configuring MacTCP and Config PPP for use with
CompuServe here, because unless you're skipping around, you haven't the foggiest idea
what I'd be talking about. However, I can't think of any better place to give these details,
so I'll try to keep them brief. Read the chapters on MacTCP and PPP before you try to
configure MacTCP and Config PPP with the information below.
MacTCP
CompuServe provides server-addressed accounts, so make sure that you have PPP
selected in the outer level of the MacTCP control panel and then click the More button to
Part III
234 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
bring up the Configuration dialog. Make sure the Server button in the Obtain Address
area in the upper right is selected. In the Domain Name Server Information area, enter
CompuServe . com . in the first left-hand field and 149.174.184.41 in the first right-hand
field. Select the Default button next to the IP address that you just entered. In the second
left-hand field, enter a period, and in the second right-hand field, enter the same IP
number. In the third left-hand field, enter a period, and in the third right-hand field, enter
149.174.184.42. Close MacTCP, restarting your Mac if it asks you to.
Config PPP
In Config PPP, the only settings that are specific to CompuServe are the phone number,
which you can get from CompuServe's automated voicemail system at 800-848-8199, and
the Connect Script, which should look like the following screen shot, substituting your
CompuServe ID number for "77777,777" and your password for "Your-Password" (see
figure 12.13).
(Unit timeout: |60 [ seconds
<CR>
®0ut OUJolt 1
(SI
OOut ®Ulalt 1 Host Nome:
□
®0ut OUlolt |cis
OOut ® UJolt |Uter ID:
□
®0ut OlOolt 1 77777, 777/go:pppconnecl
la
®0ut OUlolt |Possioord:
□
®0ut OUJolt |Vour-PQsstoord
® Out OUJolt 1
□
[ Conccl ] [ OK ]
Figure 12.13 Config PPP connect script for CompuServe.
For information on how to configure everything else, read chapter 18, "PPP." While
testing, I noticed that the performance was about half what I got with the exact same
settings on my local Internet provider. My tests were quick and non-conclusive though,
so form your own opinions.
Special Software
Unlike America Online and eWorld, you can use CompuServe's menu-based interface
from any terminal program such as ZTerm. However, CompuServe's character-based
interface is so ugly that it makes my teeth hurt. Luckily, CompuServe sells two graphical
applications that make using CompuServe's services easier and cheaper. Even if you only
anticipate using email on CompuServe, I recommend that you get CompuServe Informa-
tion Manager (CIM), or, if you don't want to use the Internet aspects of CompuServe, get
Navigator.
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 235
Mike O'Connor designed Navigator specifically to save money when using CompuServe.
You tell Navigator what you want to do in terms of reading mail, sending mail, reading
discussions on CompuServe, downloading files, and so on, and then you tell Navigator to
log on and do everything for you. Because it works quickly by itself offline, it stays on for
a shorter time than you normally would, and thereby saves you money. That's good.
However, Navigator was designed for reading discussions on CompuServe, so it's clumsy
for email use. Every item, mail or otherwise, is appended to a linear Navigator session file
that rapidly grows large and cumbersome to navigate when searching for old mail that
you haven't yet replied to.
In contrast, CIM works much better for all of the Internet services that CompuServe
provides because CompuSer\^e is designing and updating it specifically to provide
graphical access to Usenet news, FTP, and Telnet (as much as you can provide graphical
access to Telnet). Also important is the fact that CIM provides a much more flexible
interface for reading and replying to email. If you plan to use CompuServe for anything
other than participating in the discussion forums and uploading and downloading files, I
recommend that you get CIM instead of Navigator. I actually use both, because CIM is
lousy for reading discussions and retrieving files.
Internet Connections
You can use CIM to connect to CompuServe if you have the latest version of CIM (2.4.1
or later) and a Communications Toolbox Telnet tool like the VersaTerm Telnet tool. To
connect to CompuServe using CIM, go to the Special menu and choose Connection from
the hierarchical menu (see figure 12.14). In the Method pop-up menu, choose a Telnet tool
that you've previously installed in your Extensions folder. I've only found two that work
at all reliably, the VersaTerm Telnet Tool and the TCPack Telnet Tool (I used the demo).
The others I tried, including the versions of the TCPack Tool for AOL and for eWorld, the
Mark/ Space Telnet Tool, and the MP Telnet Tool, either didn't work or crashed CIM. You
can get the TCPack Telnet Tool demo from:
ftp://ftp.ascus.com/mac/demos/TCPack__Telnet_Tool.hqx
Click the Configure button and enter CompuServe . com for the host name. All other
default settings should work. Make sure the Network pop-up menu is set to Internet, and
the Connect Type menu is set to Direct Connection. Click the OK button to save your
changes.
Although this might seem to be an attractive way to connect to CompuServe, I've found it
rather flaky. In addition, CompuServe reportedly (and it seems this is true based on
performance) limits the speed at which you can connect to the speeds supported by its
modems, even if you happen to have a much faster Internet connection. The policy makes
sense, given that some of CompuServe's accounts charge different rates based on speed of
access, but it's still irritating to have a fast Internet connection throttled down to the speed
of a modem.
Services
Part
236
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Settings
CompuSerue Information Manager
Settings For: | Connection ▼!
» ““ I
[ Cancel ]
HocTCP Connection
Vour Name:
User ID: |72511,30O
Passuiord : !••••••••••
Phone Number: 242-ggg2
Retries: 10
fllternate: | /*>ivw
Neihod: | UersqTerm Tel^
Baud: | 3840Q ^
Network; | Internet
Connect Type; | Direct Con.^
Configure^ ] [ More-
Figure 12.14 C/M Settings ivindoxo.
Internet Services
CompuServe is an old service; it wasn't designed with the Internet in mind. Thus, all of
the Internet services feel as though they've been badly tacked on to a framework that
simply wasn't designed to support them. When you add in the fact that CompuServe
could really use some good interface designers, you end up with tools that work, but may
cause more frustration than they're worth. Currently, the four Internet services that
CompuServe provides internally are email, Usenet news, Telnet, and FTP. You can access
all of them (see figure 12.15) from the CompuServe Internet Services window (GO
INTERNET).
Do remember that CompuServe also provides straight MacTCP-based access through a
PPP connection — check out Part IV, "Full Internet Access," for information on how to
configure and use MacTCP and the MacTCP-based software.
Email
CIM is good at email (GO MAIL), especially in comparison to Navigator, because it can
transfer all your mail quickly and automatically. CIM shows you a nice list of all your
mail and enables you to sort it in several different ways. I seldom mess with the sorting,
but listing mail makes much more sense than forcing the user to scroll through each
message, as Navigator does (see figure 12.16).
Chapter 12 ^ Commercial Services 237
internet
CompuServe
Internet Services
Fl Ui- Irilr-I n-f
ID About Internet Mell
Si About the Internet Forums
Internet New Users Forum ♦
® Internet Resources Forum ♦
® Internet Publishing Forum +
Q Internet Feedbeck
SI Special Pricing - The Internet C
Direct Internet Access (Dial PP
;iub
P)
oim-:
§1
Telnet: Remote
Login
^C3
Iw
Internet World Megezine
Forum ♦
FTP: File
Transfer
Figure 12.15 CompuServe Internet Services.
iiBi
In Basket
97 items
Open
Delete
Sort by: | Modified
Subject
From
Size
Modified
Created
1 Re: Even better
INTERNET:mha<?»bak...
1786
8/12/93
8/10/93
1 Re: NeveBIT
INTERNET:mha<9>bak...
1600
8/12/93
8/10/93
,BCP! Update
Peter B. Sugarman
870
8/12/93
8/10/93
|Will you..
Paul McGrav
205
8/12/93
8/12/93
1 Flaming magenta: watch out for ...
Tonya Engst
888
8/9/93
8/10/93
1 Hello Back!
INTERNET :dougert<?^...
1349
8/9/93
8/10/93
1 Re: NewaBIT
INTERNET:mha<?bak...
1361
8/9/93
8/10/93
1 Shall 1 send copied?
INTERNET:mha<?-bak...
1545
8/9/93
8/10/93
1 Re: Even better
INTERNET:mha<?>bak...
1481
8/9/93
8/10/93
E;
Figure 12.16 CIM In Basket.
I often find myself receiving email that I don't have time to respond to immediately, or
perhaps the message requires enough research that I don't want to respond for a day or
two. In either case, it's easy to lose email in Navigator, whereas in CIM you can easily see
which messages need a response. CIM also makes it easy to save copies of outgoing
messages (useful for those times when you want to say, "I didn't write that!" in a hurt
tone). Also, you can file messages in different folders, essential if you receive email about
different projects.
Part II
238 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The hard part about sending email to the Internet from CompuServe is the addressing.
You must know the magic words to add to an Internet address for CompuServe to behave
properly. It's not difficult, only obscure and easy to type incorrectly. If you want to send
email to my account on the Internet, ace@tidbits . com, you prefix >INTERNET : to my
address, so the ungainly end result looks like >INTERNET: ace@tidbits.com. Easy
enough, but people often type the address slightly wrong. It doesn't seem to make a
difference whether a space lives between the colon and the start of the Internet address,
but remember that spaces are verboten within an Internet address. To further complicate
matters, when you receive Internet email in CIM or Navigator, they both politely strip the
> symbol from the beginning of the message. "Oh no," you think, "then replying won't
work." If you thought that, then you're quite clever, but wrong, at least for CIM. Don't
ask why, but CIM doesn't mind not seeing the > symbol if it isn't present in a reply.
Navigator at one point couldn't do that, so replying to Internet email without adding that
> symbol manually didn't work. I believe it works fine now, so feel free to strip the >
symbol if you're using the latest versions of CIM or Navigator.
Luckily, sending email from the Internet to CompuServe poses fewer problems. You
merely must follow tw^o simple rules. First, all CompuServe addresses are pairs of octal
numbers, or some such nonsense. My CompuServe address looks like 7251 1,306. Com-
mas aren't allowed in Internet addresses (they usually indicate a list of addresses), so you
must change the comma to a period and then add (^CompuServe. com. My address, then,
becomes 7251 1 . 306@compuserve . com. Unless you have a better memory for octal num-
bers than I do, put CompuServe addresses in a nicknames file or address book.
Usenet News
CompuServe's interface to Usenet news (GO USENET) is functional, but lousy. After you
get to the main Usenet news window, you must first select "USENET Newsreader (CIM)"
from the list of options to bring up a modal dialog that enables you to read news, sub-
scribe to newsgroups, create an article, and set various options. CIM provides a searching
interface for finding groups, and lets you enter a newsgroup name manually, which is the
only way to subscribe to groups like alt . sex to which CompuServe doesn't want to
provide easy access. After you've subscribed to a few groups (and the manual entry
method is by far the fastest, followed by the search engine), you can read articles in those
newsgroups by double-clicking on Access Your USENET Newsgroups, at which point
CIM displays a list of your subscribed groups in yet another modal dialog (see figure
12.17).
In the list of newsgroups, you can browse the articles contained within, search for text in
the subject lines of the articles (a nice touch), mark all the articles read or unread with the
oddly-named Clear and Reread buttons, and unsubscribe from newsgroups with the
Remove button. As with all of the other modal dialogs, the only way to back out is via the
Cancel button.
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 239
USBCT N«iusgroups
Figure 12.17 CIM Usenet Newsgroup list.
Browsing in a newsgroup brings up a modal dialog with a list of articles (see figure 12.18).
A Retrieve button provides the only other interesting feature in CIM's newsreader. If you
select a thread in the article list, and then click the Retrieve button, CIM downloads the
entire thread as a text file to your hard disk, where you can read it later, without incurring
any connect charges. The other functions available in this dialog are mundane — you can
start reading an article with the Get button, create a new article with the Create button,
mark a thread as read with the Clear button, and back out to the newsgroup list with the
Cancel button.
Bromse
Newsgroup ; rec. aquaria
1 IN] Oogfoca 11 / cleaner urossa okou?
2
mi Free SU fish In St. Poul, NN
1
mi LIue Sand Q S R
1
j-4
mi Octopus In a lOg with 1 lue rocks??
6
mi patching a ski Iter?
1
i”ri
mi poisonous Inverts
1
mi Suddenly Snailsl
1
mi Sc^pller for Osroa NH bulbs
5
mi Urchins. . .Rnother Question
1
Ofls Is
(8) Quoted
[ Retheue ]
1(C£LJJ
[ Create
1
[ Clear ]
[ Cancel
J
Figure 12.18 CIM Usenet article list.
Part III
240 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
When you finally click the Get button to read an article, CIM opens (surprise!) one more
modal dialog box (see figure 12.19). CIM's designers should be forced to sleep with
Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and have little signs with "Thou shalt not use modal
dialogs needlessly" pasted up in their offices. Anyway, the actual dialog for reading news
enables you to move forw^ard and backward by the article or the thread, mark an article as
unread with the Hold button, reply via email or in the newsgroup, forward an article to
someone via email, and see the full header information with the More button.
Figtire 12.19 CIM Usenet article reading window.
Sorry if I'm ranting, but CIM's Usenet interface irks me to no end. There's absolutely no
reason, other than poor design, to use so many modal dialogs that make it difficult and
confusing for the user to do much of anything. For instance, if all you wanted to do was
forward a single message to someone else via email, you would have to dive down
through six modal dialogs and once you'd forw^arded the article, come back to the surface
through those six modal dialogs. In contrast, NewsWatcher, one of the best of the
MacTCP-based Usenet newsreaders, enables you to do the same thing entirely in
modeless windows by opening a newsgroup window, double-clicking on an article to
read it, choosing Forward from the News menu, and clicking on the Send button in the
message window after you've entered the email address. In other words, what takes
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 241
many frustrating minutes in CIM is a simple task in NewsWatcher, simply because of a
decent interface. I'll shut up now. If you use CompuServe and want to read Usenet news,
CIM's newsreader works.
Telnet
Unlike eWorld and AOL, CompuServe does support outgoing Telnet (GO TELNET),
which means that you can connect to Internet sites in character-mode and do whatever it
is that the particular site in question allows. Telnet is rather dull. It's not really the point
for those of us interested in using graphical interfaces, but it can be useful on occasion. I
tried CompuSer\^e's Telnet feature by telnetting back to my Unix account on
coho . halcyon . com, and it sort of worked (see figure 12.20), but because the CIM 2.4.1 on
the Macintosh doesn't provide full VTIOO emulation, some things I tried were a little ugly
or, in the case of Lynx (a Unix-based, character-mode Web browser that requires VTIOO
emulation) unusable.
ilB Terminal Emulator -■ - ■ ifi
Hi
Telnet escope character Is
Trying 19B. 137.231.21. . .
Connected to coho.halcyo
n.con.
Escape chorocter is '*1*.
*
I
ri;;
ULTRIX U^.3fl (Rew. MO <coho> CIO
iiij
Please use coho.halcyon.com for rlogln or telnet sessions
If you are connecting to halcyon. com, please exit noe
To estoblish on account, log In os "ne«“ (no possunx-d needed)
login: tidbits
Passuiord;
Last login: lied Rpr 12 12:05:05 from penguin, tidbl ts .
halcyon.com. Public Recess Internet, Seattle, UR
Northwest Nexus Inc. ^1.206.455.3505 (voice)
ii;!
ill
• i
For assistonce, changes, or other inquiries, send mail to support6halcyon.com
For our doto-line ph^e numbers, type ‘help phones' at the shell prompt
For billing inquiries, send mail to bllllng6halcyon.com
This system participates in the Rcceptable Use Policies of the National Science
Foundation and will offer help in investigating illegal and inappropriate usage
of this machine as it connects to other Internet sites, up to and including,
but not limited to, keystroke monitoring.
ii
I
ill
>>> Recounts that hove not been used within the lost 30 days and <<<
Figure 12.20 CIM Telnet window.
FTP
CompuServe's FTP service (GO FTP) includes a list of selected popular FTP sites (see
figure 12.21 ), although it only includes eight sites, and the List of Sites button brings up
almost exactly the same list, with a few minor additions. Similarly, the Site Descriptions
button provides descriptions on the same basic list with a few exceptions. Given the
hundreds, if not thousands, of useful FTP sites available, the limited lists and seemingly
duplicated information are odd.
Services
Part
242
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
m File Transfer Protocol
CompuServe
Internet Services
il About ftp
IJFTP Disclaimer
Bl Enhancements to CompuServe’s FTP Service
8) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
SI FTP Feedback
® Internet Nev Users Forum
@ Internet Resources Forum
SI Access CompuServe's File Finders:
Having trouble getting lo an ftp site, or
.. .......... j.. ..... ..... ^ :i|
1 ^
IQ
Selected Popular Sites
List of Sites
Access a Specific Site
Site Descriptions
Figure 12.21 CompuServe FTP window.
More interesting than CompuServe's pre-chewed-for-your-convenience sites is the Access
a Specific Site button, which enables you to connect to any other Internet FTP site, assum-
ing it's not running on a Macintosh (via Peter Lewis's FTPd) or a couple of otlier plat-
forms. Humph! I'm utterly unimpressed with CompuServe's FTP interface. First of all,
when you click the Access a Specific Site button, CIM presents you with an ugly dialog
box for you to enter the site name, the initial directory, and your userid and password
(the last two of which it fills in for you with "anonymous" and your email address). Then,
when you actually make the connection, CIM shows a window with two panes and some
buttons along the bottom. The left-hand pane shows the current list of directories,
whereas the right-hand pane shows the list of files in the current director}^ (see figure
12 . 22 ).
If there aren't any directories in the current directory, CIM leaves the previous list of
directories in the left-hand pane, ignoring the fact that you can't click on them to go
anywhere. You must always click the Back or Top buttons to move out of a directory.
Although you can select multiple files to download from a directory, you cannot select
multiple files from different directories — when you leave a directory, CIM forgets any
files you've selected by clicking on the checkbox to the left of the file name. The Filter
button is handy because it enables you to limit the list to files matching a certain string,
like ’‘■.hqx. And the View button is a nice idea that can't work with long files — I suspect it's
limited to 32K or less. You can connect to a site where you have write privileges and
upload files, should you want to do that. Finally, the Leave button enables you to discon-
nect from an FTP site.
Overall, I'm unimpressed with CompuServe's FTP client. It feels sluggish and the inter-
face is clumsy. It does work, and if you need to get a file via FTP, it's worth using. For
daily use, though, I strongly recommend that you use CompuServe's PPP connection and
Anarchie or Fetch.
Chapter 12^ Commercial Serzhces 243
Current Site: ftp.tidbits.com
Current FI les: /pub/tidbl ts/ilsk/icp/^.*
Director ies
Files
Size
LJ 00 Icp-abs tracts, txt
130103
±
mai i
n anarch 1 e- 14-ui 1 ndou»s-pa tch . hqx 20520
1
(S anarch 1 e- 14 . hqx
491788
'
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49699
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ip
Oarchle-IO.hqx
85912
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Ilii
n b 1 ue-sk 1 es- 11 -ppc . hqx
24 1635
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205660
1
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587202
1
[Ilchat-21p 10. hqx
91856
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IPPI
Del lent-da.hqx
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1
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640526
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n come t-doc . hqx
902999
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18498
)[BaclT][Leaue] [ Uleti> ] [ Betrieue ) [ Upload] [ Filter )
Figure 12.22 CIM FTP file list.
Charges & Connecting
Cost-wise, CompuServe holds the title for the most confusing pricing structures around.
A while back, CompuServe introduced a Standard Pricing Plan, which allows unlimited
access to a limited set of CompuServe services (most of which aren't the ones you, as a
Macintosh or Internet user, might find interesting) for $9.95 per month. Internet email is
not included in the Standard Pricing Plan, and services that aren't included are billed at
an hourly rate of $4.80 per hour (regardless of speed, although it's still locked at modem
speeds for users with fast Internet connections). However, as of May 1, 1995, FTP, Telnet,
and Usenet news will be billed at the Internet Services rates, which include three free
hours each month and a charge of $2.50 per hour after that. Still with me? Good, because
email is another story.
With the Standard Pricing Plan's monthly fee, you get a $9.00 credit toward email, which
is billed at a rate of SO.IO for the first 7,500 characters and $0.02 for every 2,500 characters
after the first 7,500. Confusing the issue even further, those mail charges apply to sending
all mail, but only to reading email from the Internet. You don't pay for reading
CompuServe email.
The Alternative Pricing Plan costs only $2.50 per month, and has a higher connect charge,
but doesn't charge extra for Internet email. The hourly rates for the Alternative Pricing
Plan are $12.80 for 2,400 bps access and $22.80 for 9,600 or 14,400 bps access. I have no
idea how the Internet services interact with the Alternative Pricing Plan, or even if that is
allowed.
If you plan to use more than nine hours of Internet services each month, CompuServe
offers Standard Pricing Plan users the option to join the Internet Club. The Internet Club
charges $15 for 20 hours of use (on top of your normal $9.95 Standard Pricing Plan
Part III
244 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
monthly fee) and then charges $1.95 per hour after 20 hours. Unused free hours disappear
at the end of the month, and CompuServe Internet Services are free of communications
surcharges if you use CompuServe's netw^ork in the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe. If
you use a different network to access CompuServe's Internet, additional communications
surcharges apply. Luckily, no matter what you choose for Internet access via
CompuServe, it all ends up on a single bill.
You must purchase a CompuServe Membership Kit to access CompuServe. You can order
it from mail order vendors or directly from CompuServe at 800-848-8199. The package
I've seen in a recent MacConnection catalog costs only $25 and includes CIM. You also
can get more information and sign up for CompuServe via the CompuServe Web page at:
http: //wvw/. CompuServe, com/
eWorld
The most recent arrival in the commercial online service world is Apple's new eWorld
service, which opened to the public in the summer of 1994. Apple based eWorld heavily
on AOL, using the same server and client software, but with various modifications and a
somewhat different interface (see figure 12.23).
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Figure 12.23 eWorld Welcome screen (it's much nicer in color).
Currently, about all you can do with the Internet on eWorld is send and receive email.
However, the eWorld folks have announced that they will add Internet access similar to
AOL's in 1995. 1 was able to get a peek at the beta software that should arrive in mid-1995,
complete with support for Usenet news, FTP, and the World Wide Web.
Note
Chapter 12 ^ Commercial Services 245
eWorld is slated to replace AppleLink at some point in time. Apple claims to have resewed all
of the AppleLink userids on eWorld and zvill transfer those accounts when they take
AppleLink down, which means that theoretically, if you know someone's AppleLink account,
the same username should work on eWorld as well.
Internet Connections
For many people, however, the main advantage of 1.1, the future version of the eWorld
software, will be the fact that it supports connections to eWorld via a MacTCP-based
Internet connection. In the beta I used, you had to move an eWorld TCP file from a For
MacTCP Users folder into an eWorld Files folder before being able to click the Edit Local
Setup button and choose eWorld TCP from the Connect Method pop-up menu (see figure
12.24).
Home
relit Local Setup | Caned 1 [ Get Local Number... 1
Hdp
First Try
• eWorld TCP
Modem
Modem - Menuel Connect
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Scconllry.
Connect method I Modem
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Figure 12.24 eWorld Setup window.
As with America Online, the primary advantage to the TCP connection method is that it
opens up eWorld to many folks who have an Internet connection but can't call an eWorld
access number for free, and it works at faster speeds on connections made over fast,
dedicated Internet connections. At this point, it's all I use.
Internet Services
The Internet services that eWorld plans to offer later in 1995 should suffice for most
beginning Internet users, although they won't satisfy people who want a full Internet
Part III
246 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
connection. eWorld provides an Internet Resource Center that will provide access to all of
eWorld's Internet services and will provide additional inforniation and discussions about
the Internet (see figure 12.25).
Figure 12.25 eWorld Internet Resource Center,
Unfortunately, I can't show you anything beyond the base of the Internet Resource
Center, because the services weren't yet turned on, unlike the MacTCP-based access to
eWorld, which did work fine.
Email
eWorld provides a clean graphical interface for Internet email, much as does AOL.
Similarly, eWorld does not charge for email that goes in or out through its Internet
gateway (see figure 12.26).
The Internet email gateway on eWorld allows you to forward messages to Internet users
(easier than copying and pasting into a new message). You also can send email to a
number of people simultaneously, saving connect time and thus cost (in contrast
CompuServe charges you for each recipient).
Not surprisingly, eWorld suffers from the same problems as AOL. Outgoing messages are
limited in size to the amount of text that can fit in the software's message box (about
24,000 characters). You can't send attached files through the gateway (it's technically
feasible, but would increase the traffic significantly). eWorld splits large email messages
that come in from the Internet at about 23K each, which is a pain, but an improvement
from the previous 7K chunks.
To send email from eWorld to the Internet, you don't have to do anything special. You
type the Internet address in the To field and fill in the Subject field and the body of the
message, as you do when sending email to another eWorld user.
Note
Chapter 12^ Commercial Services 247
Compose Neu» Message
1 Address Book ]
To;
Adam Engst, ace^^ tidbits .com
Q
cc
tonya^tkfclts.com
iL
1 Member Dir... j
7y
7i
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( Attach Fie... 1
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re«d
f Internet
Fax
journey to the Internet? Will ^ get the arl?
the exciting conclusion of As the eWorld Tu
irl? Tune in next week for
Vims-
cheers ... -Adam
Address an Internet message using the format
username(g>domain
Example: bobsmithG^eworld.com
• An attached fie can't be sent with an Internet message.
• Unsend doesn't work for an Internet message.
• Notify When Read doesn't work for an Internet message.
(3
Figure 12,26 eWorld Mail window, with the Internet dialog box showing.
If you receive large messages on eWorld regularly, I recommend a utility called Chunkjoiner
for merging the various pieces. Look for it on eWorld or in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
name and domain to the end of the address; for eWorld, it's eworld . com. My username
on eWorld is Adam Engst, so to send me email from the Internet, you address your
message to adamengst@eworld.com.
Charges & Connecting
eWorld costs $8.95 per month, w^hich includes four free hours during evenings or week-
ends, with every hour after those four costing an additional $2.95. Daytime hours are an
additional $2.95 per hour. Apple is making eWorld software available for free if you call
800-775-4556, and there are often some special deals with something like 10 free hours of
use in the first month. In addition, the eWorld software is bundled with the definitive
book on eWorld, called eWorld: The Official Guide for Macintosh Users, (Hayden Books,
1994), written by long-time author and Macworld editor Cary Lu along with John Milligan
Ask for it in your local bookstore. Finally, for more information about eWorld, check out
their Web page at:
http: Z/vw/v/. eworld. com/
Part III
248 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Other Commercial Services
Although I recommend one of the above three commercial services for most people, there
are others that may be more appropriate for certain situations. Therefore, although the
following commercial online services aren't necessarily as common or useful for Internet
access as those I've discussed previously, I feel that they're worth mentioning.
AppleLink
Before eWorld, Apple’s online support service was
AppleLink, and it still exists, although for how much
longer is in question, and I don’t recommend that
anyone consider establishing a new account.
AppleLink, although graphical and capable of sending
and receiving Internet email, requires a clumsy
addressing scheme, cannot send or receive messages
over about 30K in length, and is tremendously
expensive. To send email from AppleLink to the
Internet, take the Internet address,
ace@^tldbits.com, for instance, and then append
^internet# to it. keeping in mind that AppleLink
cannot send mail to addresses longer than 35
characters. However, you can reply to addresses that
are that long with no trouble. To send email from the
Internet to AppleLink, just take the userid, which
sometimes resembles a name or word and other times
is just a letter plus some numbers, and append
@applellnk . apple . com.
BIX is one of the oldest of the commercial online
services. It has a direct connection to the Internet,
which makes it easy to send and receive Internet
email. BIX has no graphical interface for the
Macintosh, and perhaps in large part because of that,
it simply Isn’t one of the main online services for
Macintosh users. You also can use RP, telnet into BIX
from the Internet for reduced charges (telnet to
x25.bix.com and reply BIX to the Username prompt),
read news with the Unix nn newsreader, and use the
character-based Lynx to browse the World Wide Web.
BIX also supports Finger and Telnet. FTP on BIX works
rather oddly, so that instead of storing files on BIX and
then downloading them, files are automatically
dumped to your Mac via whatever transfer protocol you
normally use with BIX. To send email to someone on
the Internet, you type the person’s Internet email
address instead of their BIX username. To send email
from the Internet to BIX, simply append ©bix.com to
the end of the BIX username and send it out.
BIX charges $13 per month plus a connect-time charge
ranging from $1 per hour for Telnet access to $9 per
hour for dial-up access via SprintNet or Tymnet during
weekdays. The standard non-prime time rate is usually
AppleLink'
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The connection rate for AppleLink is $37 per hour for
9,600 bps access, in addition to charges for the
number of characters you transmit. Add to that $0.50
per Internet message, Incoming or outgoing.
BIX
$3 per hour. If you plan to use BIX heavily, there’s a
20/20 plan that provides 20 hours for $20, though in
addition to your $13 per month membership fee. Time
over the 20 hours Is charged at $1.80 per hour, or
$1.00 per hour if you telnet in. To get an account on
BIX, have your modem dial 800-695-4882 or 617-491-
5410 (use 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit). Press
Return a few times until you see the Login: (enter
“blx") prompt, and then type bix . At the Name?
prompt, type blx.net. If you prefer, you also can
telnet to BIX as described previously to sign up.
Chapter 12^ Commercial Services 249
Delphi
Delphi boasts of full Internet access, but still forces
users to suffer through a custom character-based
menu system on top of VMS, a mainframe operating
system used by DEC Vax computers. There is a
Macintosh graphical interface called D-Lite, but the last
version I saw was in the running for worst Macintosh
program ever (and that was when it worked). Delphi
doesn’t do anything strange with addressing — to send
email to an Internet user, use his Internet address
instead of the Delphi address in Delphi’s mall
program. To send email from the Internet to someone
at Delphi, simply append @delphi.com to the Delphi
userid. My address on Delphi looks like
adam_engst@delphi . com.
For information on connecting to Delphi, call 800-695-
4005. Monthly rates are either $10.00 for four hours
of use, with extra hours at $4.00 each, or $20.00 for
20 hours, with additional hours at $1.80 each. If your
account has an Internet connection, you are charged
an additional $3.00 per month. Delphi often offers five
hours free so that you can try out the service, so ask
about the current deal when you call. Delphi plans to
offer a full graphical interface in the relatively near
future, and in an interesting twist, plans to base it
entirely on Internet access via an authenticated Web
browser. At that point, Delphi will be selling PPP
access to the Internet and using Delphi will be just like
using any other Web page (except for the membership
fee).
http: / /wvw. delphi.com/
GEnie
GEnie Is neither a hotbed of Macintosh activity nor
even a major online service any more, and Its Internet
connections leave most everything to be desired.
Luckily, a graphical interface to GEnie arrived since the
last edition of this book; before that there was only a
clumsy character-based interface. GEnie supports only
Internet email, but can access Archie and FTP via
email. To send email from GEnie to the Internet, use
the standard Internet address If you’re sending from
the Internet Mail Service page. If you’re sending the
message from the GE Mall page, append @inet# to
the end of the Internet address. To send email from
the Internet to GEnie, append @genie . geis . com to
your friend’s GEnie username. There is a difference
between userid (or login name) and username on
GEnie. Internet email must go to the username.
Welcome to
GEnie!
Utario: |«502451 ~|
Pitiivoid: {■••»»»• I
GEnie charges $8.95 for the first four hours each
month, with additional hours billed at $3.00 per hour
for non-prime time access. The cost is $9.50 per hour
on weekdays from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. You can get
more information about GEnie by telephoning 800-638-
9636.
http://www.genie.com/
Part III
250 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Outland
Outland is a nationwide commercial service dedicated
to computer games. However, we're not talking just
any computer games. It’s specifically designed to
support graphical multi-player games with those
multiple players coming in from all around the world.
Along with a variety of standard board games, Outland
offers a special version of Delta Tao’s fabulous space
opera game, Spaceward Ho!. Why am I blathering
about games here? Well, Outland is unusual in that it
is accessible only via the Internet, either via a MacTCP-
based connection or via Telnet from a Unix shell
account. You must use Outland’s special software,
which is available for free, although playing the games
costs money. Charges are $9.95 per month, flat-rate,
with a five-hour free test period. You can contact
Outland for more Information at 800-PLAY-OUT, or at
outland@aol.com. You can retrieve the Outland
software on the Internet.
http: //wwv/. outland. com/
ftp://ftp.outland.com/pub/outland-all-files.hqx
Pipeline Internaut
Internaut is the proprietary graphical client software for
an Internet provider called Pipeline, now owned by PSI,
a large Internet provider. Internaut provides access to
email, news, Talk, Archie, f=TP, and Gopher, with some
additional features thrown in to handle weather
reports, IRC, and VTIOO terminal emulation. Should
you download images in GIF or JPEG format, Internaut
automatically displays them for you. There appears to
be a fairly tight integration between the parts of the
program; for instance, you can mail the contents of a
Gopher window to someone with the Mall Contents
command In the Readers menu.
Although you cannot use MacTCP-based software (such
as a Web browser, which Internaut currently lacks) over
a connection made with Internaut, you can now use
Internaut over an existing MacTCP connection, much
- Main Menu ~|
The Pipeline: Infonnelion, Software, Accounts . . .
The Internet: Guides end Tools
The Reference Desk
Arts end Leisure
Society, Law, Politics
Shopping: The Pipeline ^toJi
Weather E ve tyvhere
The Government
OtherGophers and Infotmaiion Servers
M
N«ws
fi
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as you can with America Online. For more information,
contact Pipeline at info@pipeline.com or 800-453-
PIPE.
http://www.pipeline.com/
Prodigy
Currently the least Mac-like of the services with
graphical interfaces. Prodigy supports several Internet
services. Most notable is a Web browser that Is only
available for Windows now (a Mac version is tentatively
slated for the end of 1995), but Prodigy also supports
Internet email and Usenet news for Mac users.
Prodigy’s online help claims It can’t receive messages
over 60K; in fact. It splits messages into chunks if the
cofitinues
Chapter 12 ^ Commercial Sewices 251
original is too large. To send email to a Prodigy user,
append @prodigy.com to the user’s Prodigy
address— sending email to the Internet is straightfor-
ward. File attachments (for both internal and Internet
email) aren’t currently supported, but should be soon.
Prodigy offers full access to Usenet news, and in a
nice change from policies of yesteryear, it does not
censor or withhold any messages on Usenet from
Prodigy users.
Prodigy has three pricing plans that interact with three
types of areas on Prodigy— PLUS, CORE, and FREE
areas. FREE areas are free, of course, and Internet
email and Usenet news both fall in the PLUS category.
Anyway, the Basic Plan costs $9.95 per month for five
hours of PLUS or CORE usage. The Value Plan costs
$14.95 per month for unlimited CORE use plus five
hours of PLUS use. Rnally, the 30/30 Plan offers 30
hours of PLUS or CORE usage for $29.95 per month.
Any usage beyond that included in the subscription
plan costs $2.95 per hour, and rates are Independent
of time of day or speed of access. You do need
Prodigy’s software, and the easiest way to get it Is to
call 800-PRODIGY and ask for a free startup kit. It
comes with 10 hours free, although you must give a
credit card number to sign up, and if you don’t cancel
before the end of your 10 hours, you’re automatically
subscribed to the Basic Plan. You also can find some
more information (and, in the future, perhaps the Mac
software) on the Web at:
http://www.astranet.com/
TCP /Connect II Remote & Instant InterRamp
InterCon has released a less-expensive version of its
powerful integrated program, TCP/Connect II, that
requires neither MacTCP or a separate SLIP or PPP
program. This is not to imply that TCP/Connect II
Remote doesn’t use Internet standards — it does — but
because it includes both the TCP code and the SLIP or
PPP code internally, when you connect using TCP/
Connect II Remote, you cannot use any other MacTCP-
based programs. That’s not as large of a limitation as
it is with something like Pipeline Internaut, since TCP/
Connect II Remote includes a full set of Internet
clients, including a Web browser. But programs like
CU-SeeMe, Bolo, and MacWeather are simply out of
the question If you rely on TCP/Connect II Remote.
Contact InterCon at sales@intercon.com or 703/
709-5500; 703/709-5555 (fax).
In addition, PSI, one of the large Internet providers,
uses TCP/Connect II Remote as part of its Instant
InterRamp package. The main difference between the
standard TCP/Connect II Remote and Instant
InterRamp is a custom application that helps you set
-jLL-X,.Ii!r TCP/ConnecI II ConflQurollon " |
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per hour after that), accessible from both normal and
ISDN phone numbers around the U.S. Luckily, the
Instant InterRamp service from PSI is a standard PPP
account, and it can be used with MacTCP, MacPPP,
and MacTCP-based applications as well as with TCP/
Connect II Remote, which doesn’t use MacTCP.
http : / /wwv/. intercon . com/intercon . html
http: //WWW. psi.com/
Part III
252 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Email Utilities
As I mentioned previously, there are a couple of programs that make dealing with email
on the commercial online services quite a bit easier, Emailer and MailConverter.
Emailer
Emailer, due to appear sometime in the middle of 1995 from Claris, is being developed by
Guy Kawasaki's Fog City Software, It's a program that Guy had a strong hand in because
like many people in the industry, Guy has a large number of email accounts on different
services, and checking mail on each one is a royal pain. Enter Emailer, which Guy and the
folks at Fog City Software designed to be your central email program. Emailer currently
can connect to CompuServe and RadioMail and understands POP and SMTP for talking
to Internet email accounts, and America Online and eWorld are slated for support before
Emailer hits the streets. Other services, like BIX or GEnie, may also appear at a later date.
I've been testing alpha versions of Emailer for several months, and it's worked like a
champ with CompuServe. After you set up a service (see figure 12.27) by choosing
Services from the Setup menu and double-clicking on the service name in the list, you
can enter your account and comiection configuration information.
Seruices List
JL Edit
S#rv<»N*m»
Amt rioa 0n1in«
•World
lnUm*t
Rodionrwii
Figure 12.27 Emailer's Services ComipuSewe Setup luindow.
Because Guy recognized that just as many of us have accounts on multiple different
services, we also may have multiple accounts, as I do on CompuServe with a straight
CompuServe account and my main ZiffNet/Mac account, as you can see in figure 12.27.
Chapter 12 ♦ Comnwrcial Services 253
The configuration for each service is tailored to that service, so when you configure your
Internet account, you enter things like your POP account, SMTP server, and return
address. In a nice touch, Emailer supports Internet Config, which ships on the disk with
this book, and which holds all of these sorts of pieces of information for use by any
Internet program that wants to support Internet Config.
Of course, many people travel around, and need to connect to the different services using
different phone numbers. In the past, it's been a pain to reconfigure each different pro-
gram, CIM, AOL, or eWorld, for the local phone numbers in the places you regularly visit;
Emailer turns this task into a one-time event (see figure 12.28).
Locations List
+ Add
D»lcU I Edit
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Horn* in Renton
Location Entry: Boston
tancfl | ("
8«vt
Looition name : | Boston
Local area code ifsT?
Sofviot 1
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s
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Done
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J
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el
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Modam Port
a
::
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a
Modam init siring :
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Modam spaakar:
ioff^
a
Prin>*ry - i
Phona numbar:
1868-0524
Baud rata :
119200
a
Figure 12,28 Emailer Locations configuration windows.
But Emailer's elegant design doesn't stop there. Anyone who uses a number of different
services doesn't want to connect to each of them manually throughout the day. It's much
more convenient to have the program connect automatically at a preset time, and in fact,
CIM, AOL, and eWorld can all do this. Well, so can Emailer, and it's more flexible than
the lot of them (see figure 12.29).
Part m
254
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 12.29 Emailer Schedules configuration.
All right, so we have a program that can connect to multiple services using multiple
accounts in many different locations at pre-specified times. Emailer has to know how to
send mail from one service to another, and as you'd expect, it relies on the Internet, which
can connect to all of these different services. You can, of course, reply to CompuServe
mail back through CompuServe, but if you'd rather use a cheaper connection through the
Internet say, you can also set Emailer's Destinations settings to send mail back through a
different service than it was received from (see figure 12.30). I especially like this feature,
because I can have all my mail come in from CompuServe and go out through the Inter-
net. In addition, if I want to send new mail to someone on CompuServe, Emailer uses this
information to properly address the message so it's delivered to CompuServe via the
Internet.
Figure 12.30 Emailer Destinations configuration.
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 255
I haven't even gotten to how Emailer helps you read and reply to messages, but it has one
other extremely notable feature that many people would appreciate — full filtering capa-
bilities that can auto forward or auto reply to a message, as I've done in figure 12.31. You
can set priorities, file messages, and filter on basically any piece of information in an
incoming mail message. Emailer's filtering capabilities, mostly thanks to the auto forward
and auto reply features are perhaps the best I've ever seen.
Figure 1231 Emailer Mail Actions setup.
Enough of these special features. When you connect to a service, Emailer brings in all
waiting mail, and sends all mail queued for that service, assuming of course that you ask
it to do that since the two actions can be activated separately. Mail comes into your In
Box, accessible from the Emailer Browser window, and double-clicking on a message
opens it for reading (see figure 12.32).
Part III
256
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
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To:
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Re; Uhat do you think about ..?
4/14/95 1:02 PTl
Joe Se«ell« 74136.3609compuserve.com
Rdoe Engit, 72Sll.3069coipuserve.com
Thonks for the response, i did a Web seorch, ond found pobox. corn's veb poge.
(Curiously enough, pobox.cce doesn't ping.)
flh, eel I, It was worth a try. :)
Joe
Figure 12.32 E77tailer Browser In Box m^d message window.
As you can see from the buttons available, almost anything you could want to do with a
message is available here, including deleting it (Emailer moves it to a Deleted Mail box in
the Filing Cabinet part of the Browser for later deletion), filing in a separate mailbox,
printing the letter, forwarding it to another person, and replying (and Emailer quotes the
selected text when you reply, a great feature). You can also move back and forth between
the messages in the current mailbox, and Emailer can automatically move read messages
to a Read Mail box in the Filing Cabinet if you want. If you want to see who the message
was sent to, the triangle in the upper left-hand corner flips down to display that header
information, and clicking on the plus button next to the sender's name adds that person to
your Address Book.
Speaking of the Address Book, it's almost a work of art (see figure 12.33). You can store
multiple addresses for users easily (including multiple addresses at the same service); you
can create groups of users; and you can filter the list on text strings once it gets large so
that it becomes easy to find people. I could go on for some time, but that would spoil the
fun. Suffice it to say, that it's really easy to create new messages for people from the
Address Book, and if you have it and a message open at the same time, you can drag an
entry to the message from the Address Book to include that person in the message.
Chapter 12 ♦ Commercial Services 257
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Figure 12.33 Ernailer Address Book.
Other useful features in Ernailer include search capability within saved mail, multiple
mailboxes for filing mail, support for enclosures, and even support for enclosures from
CompuServe to other services — something that isn't possible any other way. Overall,
Ernailer is simply a very good program, and I strongly recommend that anyone who must
rely on different multiple email accounts on the commercial services buy a copy when it
comes out in the middle of 1995.
There are two reasons why I'm not currently using Ernailer in favor of the commercial
version of Eudora. First, in a design mistake, Ernailer stores each message as a separate
file on your hard disk (in comparison with Eudora, which stores multiple messages in a
single mailbox file in Unix mailbox format). Because most messages are relatively small,
they can take up a full block size on disk. For instance, the partition of my hard disk that
holds email is formatted to 700 MB or so. That means that a 500 byte email message in
Emailer's format takes up about 20K on disk, since that's the smallest file size possible
with such a large disk. Considering how many hundreds of messages I get and send and
keep each day, this inefficiency is a problem. Second, although I like Emailer's interface
and 1 think it's well done for the most part. I've come to really like the simplicity and
elegance in Eudora. That's purely a personal preference though.
Actually, one feature has yet to appear in Ernailer that's been promised for the shipping
version — redirect. Eudora pioneered the redirect capability, which enables an email
program to forward a message to another user without making it seem as though the
message came from you. For instance, if I get a message that Tonya should deal with in
Eudora, I redirect it to her rather than forwarding it. That way, when she gets the message
and replies, the reply goes to the original sender, not to me. Once Ernailer has a redirect
Part
258 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
feature, I plan to use it to redirect all mail from CompuServe, eWorld, and AOL straight
back out to my Internet account, so they come in via Eudora and can be stored with the
rest of my mail. I can't wait.
I also can't give you any details about buying Emailer because they aren't yet finalized (I
suppose it's even possible that the name could change before Claris releases it). Keep your
eyes out where you normally buy software — your dealer, a mail order catalog, or an
online vendor — and I'm sure you'll see it as soon as it's available. I do believe Emailer will
be inexpensive since Fog City Software has pre-sold it at user group meetings for about
$30. I'd be very surprised if the final list price was more than two or three times that.
MailConverter
I've become fairly fond of Richard Shapiro’s free
MailConverter because it saves me from having to read
and reply to email within America Online and eWorld.
Instead, I use AOL's FlashSessions or eWorld's
Automatic Courier to download the mail, then I have
MailConverter convert the messages into a Eudora
mailbox, where I can read and reply in a powerful and
consistent environment. MailConverter also can
convert a number of mail formats, including messages
from LeeMail, MacEMall, cc:Mail (limited support),
VMS mail (limited support), Pine, Elm, and files saved
from various newsreaders, Including NewsWatcher.
MailConverter also will break up mail digests Into
individual messages. MailConverter supports drag-and-
drop and is rather flexible In terms of dealing with
strange headers. Until AOL and eWorld support
automatic mail forwarding, I’ll probably use
MailConverter with them.
MoilConuerter Settings
□ Rlloiu only TENT files as Input
Q Delete Input file after conuerting
[g] Confirm before seeing
Q Truncate output filename
□ Restrict messages to 32X
Send to application
Default Input folder: [ Rdam Engst mall I
Default saue folder 1 Eudora Folder ~|
Creator |CS0m
File type: [TEHT
® Eudora
O 2-Mall
O Other
(Same as...]
[ Cancel dGD
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
PowerTalk Gateway for CompuServe
Although not specifically related to the Internet,
CompuServe has made a gateway available for Apple’s
PowerTalk email technology so you can send and
receive CompuServe email in the same way that you
can send and receive PowerTalk email or email using
any other PowerTalk gateway, such as StarNIne’s
Internet email gateway. I don’t recommend PowerTalk
for more than a few messages a day, but you can get a
complete set of these gateways in:
ftp: //ftp. support .apple.com/pub/appl0_8w_updates/US/mac/system_sw/PowerTalk/
Chapter 12 4 Commercial Services 259
SignatureQuote
Although most decent email programs have the
capability to add a signature to your messages, it’s
uncommon for the commercial services to support
signatures. In addition, none of the commercial
services make it easy to quote text from a message
in a reply. Rick Hoizgrafe’s $10 shareware
SignatureQuote FKEY is the answer to such prob-
lems— just configure it with your signature and add
your signature with a single key press. To quote text.
just copy it, activate SignatureQuote, and click one of
the two Quote buttons to use one of two quoting
styles. I highly recommend It for use with the commer-
cial services.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Wrapping Up
Although I cannot recommend any of them as a replacement for a full MacTCP-based
Internet connection, the commercial online services provide an easy way to dip into the
Internet without diving headfirst. The liability of taking the dip in favor of the dive is that
you'll quickly find that in terms of Internet access, the commercial online services are
extremely shallow. A number of bulletin boards have gained full Internet access in recent
months as well, and I expect more to appear all the time. Because most bulletin board
systems charge little or nothing for access, they can be a great way to obtain inexpensive
Internet access.
Enough talking about limited access, though, let's move on to Unix shell accounts, which
are as powerful as they are ugly for Macintosh users.
Part III
Note
Bulletin Board Systems
This is a short chapter for a couple of reasons. First off, it can be difficult to find a bulletin
board system (BBS) in your area, and because the resources available for finding them
vary from place to place, I can't really help you. Second, there's no telling what level, if
any, of Internet access a BBS may provide. With those caveats aside, for limited Internet
access, an account on a FirstClass, NovaLink Professional, or TeleFinder BBS might be an
inexpensive and efficient way to start out on the Internet. I consider these three to be the
main graphical BBSs in the Macintosh world. Several others exist, but they aren't used
nearly as heavily.
A BBS is a computer system that you can connect to, usually via modem. Once there, you
can upload and download files, send and receive email, and participate in discussions. Unlike
the commercial online services, a BBS usually serves a small group of people in a specific area.
1 don't cover anything but the main graphical BBSs in this chapter because, frankly, there
are so many of them and most are ugly to use. I use a Mac because I don't like custom
character-based menu interfaces, and almost every BBS with a character-based interface
that I've ever used has irritated me. The editors are lousy and the commands are cryptic,
and it's just not what using a Macintosh is all about. So, if you can only find Internet
access through a character-based BBS, you're on your own, although it may marginally
provide Internet email and Usenet news.
262 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
FirstClass
FirstClass BBSs are actually most commonly used as conferencing systems within large
companies and organizations. However, they're also extremely popular among the user
group community (see figure 13.1).
Figure 13,1 FirstClass Login window.
With SoftArc's excellent FirstClass BBS software, and a special add-on gateway to the
Internet, a Macintosh BBS can sport a clean graphical interface and provide an email and
Usenet news connection. Most of these sorts of Internet connections are handled through
UUCP gateways, which means the FirstClass BBS calls an Internet host every few hours to
transfer email and news. However, there are an increasing number of FirstClass BBSs that
have dedicated Internet connections. These can offer faster turnaround on mail and news,
as well as the promise of additional Internet services like FTP in the near future.
It's also possible, though still somewhat unusual, for a FirstClass BBS to be accessible over
the Internet. You can come in by way of a standard Telnet session or via the graphical
FirstClass software if you have a MacTCP-based connection to the Internet.
The easiest way to use FirstClass over the Internet is if the organization running the
FirstClass server gives you a FirstClass settings file, at which point you can just double-
click on it to launch FirstClass and connect to that server. However, if you don't already
have a settings file, it's relatively easy to create one.
Note Note
Chapter 13 ♦ Bulletin Board Si/stetns
263
The FirstClass server I use in this example is called designOnline, an online resource for
design professionals. Am/one can login, although you'll only have limited access at first. You
also can read about them on the Web at:
http://www.dol.com/
To create a settings file, launch the application. Click Cancel when it asks you to open an
existing settings file and choose New from the File menu. After you name and save the
settings file, FirstClass brings up the Login window dialog. Click the Setup button, and
from the Connect via pop-up menu, choose TCP-IP.FCP (see figure 13.2).
Internet
Conntot v>a : | TCP-FFCF | S»tup {
Uj*r ID
Password
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Fill m if servKe is Kcessible via ttie network ;
Server:
Network:
Fill m if service is accessible via modem
Phone • : | |
f Cancel | [| Saue
Figure 13.2 FirstClass TCP Setup dialog.
Enter the IP name or number of the FirstClass ser\^er to which you want to connect in the
Server field. Click the Save button to save your changes. Of course, if you already have
an account, you can enter your userid and password as well. From this point, using
FirstClass over the Internet is just like using it via a modem.
By default, the graphical FirstClass client uses port 3000. Click the Setup button in the
Communications Setup dialog, and then turn the Advanced Settings triangle. If you telnet to
a FirstClass server, you generally use port 3004 instead.
FirstClass can receive Usenet newsgroups via an Internet gateway, which is an excellent
way to bring more information into a fairly small BBS. Unfortunately, the current inter-
face to reading news isn't as full-featured as I would like. Working with threads is diffi-
cult or impossible, and there's no easy way to entirely skip an uninteresting thread (see
figure 13.3).
Bulletin
Board Systems
Note
264
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
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Figure 13.3 FirstClass nezosgroups.
To send an email message to the Internet, type the Internet address and append , Inter-
net to it. My Internet address from a FirstClass system looks like
ace@tidbits . com, Internet. Because most FirstClass systems don't call out all that often
to send and receive Internet email, don't expect immediate responses. Sending email to a
FirstClass BBS is no different than sending to any other Internet site — you must know the
username and sitename.
In general, you can figure out usernames by taking the person's username on FirstClass
and replacing the spaces with underscores (and FirstClass is pretty good at guessing
based on your attempt). However, making this change can result in some ugly addresses.
If I am Adam C . Engst on a FirstClass board, for example, the Internet form of my
username on the local dBUG BBS (run by Seattle's downtown Business Users' Group) is
adam_c ._engst@dbug . org. Again, the sitename in the address is individual to each
FirstClass BBS. It's also possible for the administrator to create aliases, so I could also be
ace@dbug.org on the local BBS. The aliases are simply easier for others to type.
FirstClass distinguishes betzveen usernames that identify you to other users (Adam C.
Engst, for example) and userids that identify you to the softzuare (mine on the local BBS is
1892). It's not a big deal, but if you zuant to be correct....
If you can find a local FirstClass BBS that's also in some way connected to the Internet, I
recommend you try it out. It's a good interface for getting started with Internet email and
news, and most BBSs have either minimal or nonexistent fees.
You can find more information about the FirstClass software from SoftArc by sending
email to sales@sof tare . com. You can download the free FirstClass client software from
any FirstClass BBS, or on the Internet in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/bbs/
Chapter 13 ^ Bulletin Board Systems 265
NovaLink Professional ^
^ Bulletin
^ Board Systems
With a graphical interface called NovaTerm, NovaLink Professional can support S
Internet email and Usenet news. It also can accept connections over the Internet, either
in command-line mode via Telnet or with the graphical client via a MacTCP-based
Internet connection.
You can connect to only a few NovaLink systems over the Internet. It's simply a matter of
knowing the Internet address and switching to MacTCP in the Settings dialog. I presume
that many more have UUCP connections to the Internet for retrieving Internet email and
Usenet news (see figure 13.4).
fc-Mail Menu
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human Areas
Figure 13.4 Email and nezvs hi NovaLink.
If you connect to a NovaLink BBS that has full Internet connections, you also can telnet
out of it, which is a nice touch — and a useful feature for a BBS to offer. In the next version
of the NovaLink Professional software, ResNova has promised that you will be able to
browse the World Wide Web as well, which is far neater than Telnet. This will set
NovaLink apart from the other contenders in the BBS world.
Note
266 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The public BBS to which I connected over the Internet, Global Democracy Netzvork
(chrf. gdn.org), is a nonprofit human rights organization. It zoorks with members of
parliament around the zuorld to institutionalize human rights protections and increase
democracy. Along the way, they're trying to get these members of parliament to become
Internet users— a laudable goal. Tzvo other NovaLink systems currently accessible on the
Internet are mpd. amaranth . com and infoport . com.
There's not much else to say about Internet connections via NovaLink systems, except
that the process seems to work and is relatively speedy. You can contact ResNova Soft-
ware, the makers of NovaLink, at sales@resnova . com or inf o@resnova . com, and you
can get the NovaTerm client program from any NovaLink BBS, or on the Internet in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/bbs/
TeleFinder
TeleFinder also provides a graphical interface BBS that (with additional software, called
InterFinder, from Andreas Fink of Microframe) can connect to the Internet to send and
receive email and news (see figure 13.5).
Conferences
Conference I
^ Service Bureau Forum
40 msgs
Sun. Jun5, 1994
8:57 AM
^ Vanted
52 ms9S
Sat, Jun4, I9S4
8:30 AM
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2 msgs
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2:10 R4
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6 msgs
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22 ms9S
Thu, 1994
7:40R-1
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5?2 msgs
Thu, Jun2, 1994
6:38 PM
21 msgs
Thu. J(a»2. 1994
10:37 AM
D _ . Internet connectiulty ' _ _
To: ALL 12/ 10/03 5: 15 PM
From: Eric Hoffinann CiT’l i . ; — I f7=r"r ; —
Subject: Dial-up Internet connection 1 1 | ^ PoSt | |[i] Reply
R number of Sgsops haue been posting asking more obout connecting their BBS to
the Internet. R good ploce to stcu't uould be Hdam bngst'f "Internet Storter Kit"
book mhich explains nang of programs and methods for setting up an Internittent
SLIP or PPP connection to an Internet service provider for exchanging mail and
files Hare is the ordering Informotlon for angone mho eculd like to obtain this
book. Don’t forget about mentioning the special TidBits code when placing gour
order for 20* off the normal price!
Order ing Detai Is
The Internet Starter Kit for tiocintosh, bg fldom C Engst
Published by Hogden Books ISBM 1-56830-064-6.
$29.95 U.S.R. $37.95 Conoda. Shipping cost varies
800/428-5331 <U.S. toll free voice orders >
317/581-3535 (US, local voice orders In Indiona)
re,,,, .,«i,-*'»
!i
Select | 4 f By Number ||.®. By Date |||i From List 1 17/21
Figure 13.5 TeleFinder Internet Connectivity discussion (and no, I didn't fake the
screen shot— it really said that!).
Note
Chapter 13 ♦ Bulletin Board Systems 167
The BBS package (host and client) is called TeleFinder Group Edition. The freely distributed Bulletin
client program that's generally customized for a specific BBS is called TeleFinder User. The ^ Board Systems
more fidl-featured shareware client and terminal emulator is called TeleFinder Pro. ^
TeleFinder Pro has one of the most interesting graphical interfaces I've seen — it takes over
your monitor and sort of reproduces the way the Finder looks. It confused me a bit at first
because I have two monitors on my Mac. TeleFinder Pro seemed to move a bunch of my
desktop icons around whenever I was in the TeleFinder application. TeleFinder User, in
contrast, uses an interface more like FirstClass's desktop within a window metaphor (see
figure 13.6). Both work fine for connecting to TeleFinder BBSs.
Spider IsUrtd BBS TCP 1 BBS Desktop
E m ^ ft, ^
Upk»d Here! About Sptder Island | ^ Public Files
.. .w AdamEn^st Public Conferences
Chat Room
jhl
a
Figure 13.6 TeleFinder Pro's Change Port dialog.
You can connect over the Internet to a TeleFinder BBS in command-line mode (all of
these graphical BBS programs also offer straight character-based modes) by telnetting
to spiderisland.com. You need special software to use either TeleFinder User or
TeleFinder Pro over a MacTCP-based Internet connection. That softw'are, called
TeleFinder User TCP, creates a virtual "port" that you can select instead of the modem or
printer port when you're configuring TeleFinder Pro (see figure 13.7). From TeleFinder
Pro's Special menu, choose Change Port after installing TeleFinder User TCP in your
Extensions folder.
268
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Serial Port Selections i
port name man bps status
Figure 13,7 TeleFinder Pro's Change Port dialog.
After you've selected that port, you can configure TeleFinder Pro to ''dial" a TeleFinder
BBS. Click the port icon for TeleFinder User TCP that appears in the lower left of the
screen and create a new Service. In the Service Information dialog, replace the phone
number with an @ character and either the IP number or IP name of that macliine (see
figure 13.8).
Figure 13,8 Configuring TeleFinder Pro for the Internet.
Chapter 13 ♦ Bulletin Board Systems 269
So, to connect to Spider Island's own BBS over the Internet, I told the TeleFinder Pro
software (via TeleFinder User TCP) to "dial" @spiderisland . com, which it did, complete 2^
with faked modem messages and everything. Once I was connected, everything worked ^
as I expect it does when you dial in via modem, and the speed was even quite good. ^
TeleFinder User is easier to configure than TeleFinder Pro because you don't have to
muck around with changing ports or anything like that. When you launch the program, it
presents you with a Connection dialog, in which you can enter your username, password,
and the connection method (see figure 13.9). Clicking the Configure button brings up a
dialog for entering the IP address and port number (1474 by default) of the TeleFinder
BBS to which you want to connect.
Figure 13.9 Configuring TeleFinder Pro for the Internet.
For more information about TeleFinder Pro, contact Spider Island Software at
support@spiderisland . com. For some reason the TeleFinder TCP User software wasn't
at spiderisland . com, but it is stored on ftp . tidbits . com. You can retrieve either the
TeleFinder Pro and TeleFinder User client programs in:
ftp://spiderisland.com/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.eom//pub/tidbits/tisk/bbs/
Bulletin
Board Systems
270 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Wrapping Up BBSs
As more inexpensive Internet connections appear, I expect we'll see many more of these
graphical bulletin boards appearing on the Internet. If nothing else, supporting a number
of modems and phone lines isn't cheap, so offering connections via the Internet might
even be cheaper for many.
Although I cannot recommend any of them as a replacement for a full MacTCP-based
Internet connection, the graphical BBSs provide an easy and usually inexpensive way to
dip into the Internet without diving headfirst. Of course, you trade that ease of use and
lesser expense for limited functionality, although all of the BBSs plan to add more Internet
support in the future.
Enough talk about limited access, though. Let's move on and talk about enhancements to
the common Unix shell account.
- ,r
Shell Account
Enhancements
Welcome to old-style Internet access — souped up for your surfing pleasure! In this
chapter I take you on a fast flight through the few Macintosh programs that can work
over a Unix command-line interface (usually known as a Unix shell account).
I do not tell you how to use Unix in this chapter, or for that matter in any chapter. For
those of you who have seen previous editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, I re-
moved that section from this chapter. Why? Several reasons. First, with PPP and SLIP
accounts now commonplace, iPs much less likely that you will have to suffer with a Unix
shell account. Second, and I'll be honest here, I didn't feel that my treatment was suffi-
ciently complete. There are many other books that cover the topic more completely, and I
decided that I should stick to my strength — Macintosh software. Third and finally, by
reducing the page count of the book, Tm hopefully saving a few trees.
A book that has been recommended to me in regard to learning Unix is Dave Taylor's
Teach Yourself UNIX in a Week (Sams Publishing, 1994, ISBN 0-672-30464-3), mostly
because analogies both to DOS and to the Macintosh are included throughout. For those
that know and dislike Unix, you owe it to yourself to check out The llnix-Haters Handbook
by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann (IDG Books, 1994, ISBN 1-
56884-203-1). Those already on the Internet with access to a Web browser (one wonders if
Note
272 hjteniet Starter Kit for Maciutosh
they need much help with Unix at that point) might also check out the popular Internet
Roadmap online class at:
http://v/w\v.brandonu.ca/-ennsnr/Resources/Roadmap/V/elcome.html
How can you tell if you have a shell account? Simple. If you use a terminal emulator like
MicroPhone or ZTerni to connect, and once you're coimected if you type Unix commands on
a command line, then you're using a shell account.
Creating a program to act like a monkey and type the appropriate commands on the Unix
command line is quite a bit more difficult than it might sound. The main problem is that a
surprising number of variations of Unix exist, and even different sites running the same
flavor of Unix may have their machines set up differently. The situation worsens when
new versions of Unix programs appear with slightly different commands or slightly
different results to old commands. It's a programmer's nightmare.
Thus, the few programs that can exist in this harsh environment have evolved some
similar methods of coping. Almost without exception, they work by relying on the user to
get them properly connected to the remote system, and from there they take over, usually
connected directly to the appropriate server port for email or news or whatever. I say
"whatever," but in fact, with one exception, the only two types of programs that work on
Unix shell accounts are email programs and newsreaders. The exception is Homer, a
client program for IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.
Actually, there is one other application. Pipeline's Internaut, that provides graphical
Internet access without MacTCP or standard SLIP or PPP. Pipeline provides access to a
number of Internet services, although not all the ones you might want to use, and requires
a specific sort of account that isn't all that common.
However, the main solution to the problem of the Unix shell account is a program that
has seriously shaken up the Internet world. The Internet Adapter, or TIA. Let's look at it
first, and then at Eudora, which is another useful solution, before we spin through the
remaining programs that can pretty up a Unix shell account.
The Internet Adapter
On occasion in the past. I've seen postings in which people wonder why someone hasn't
written a program to enable graphical programs that normally require a MacTCP-based
connection to work with a normal shell account. There are a number of graphical Internet
programs, such as Pipeline's Internaut (see chapter 12, "Commercial Services") on differ-
ent platforms that use a proprietary protocol for talking to the host machine, which means
that you can't use the standard Macintosh Internet programs such as Eudora, Anarchie,
Note
Chapter 14 4 Shell Account Enhancements 273
and MacWeb. Instead you must use the limited graphical client software provided by the
same people who created the proprietary protocol.
I don't approve of this method of providing Internet access for two reasons. First, and
most importantly, you're seriously limited in your choice of software for any particular
task. With a full MacTCP-based connection, I can choose between Anarchic and Fetch,
Netscape and MacWeb, Eudora and VersaTerm-Link, NewsWatcher and InterNews and
Nuntius. In fact, I may even use multiple programs for the same thing — I like and use
both Anarchic and Fetch for different types of FTP tasks. You lose that flexibility when
you're locked into a proprietar}^ solution. Second, the Internet is a vast and fast-moving
place, and new capabilities appear all the time, generally supported first, and often best,
by freeware and shareware programmers. If you're locked into a specific proprietary
program, there's no way you could use Cornell's Internet videoconferencing software,
CU-SeeMe, play Stuart Cheshire's wonderful Bolo tank game, or check the weather with
Chris Kidwell's MacWeather. All of those programs depend on the standard TCP/IP
protocols that the Internet relies on, and these proprietary programs, useful as they may
be, don't give you a standard TCP connection to the Internet.
TIA Basics
Such is not the case with The Internet Adapter. TIA is a relatively small (about 250K) Unix
program that you run on your normal Unix shell account, and it acts as a SLIP emulator.
In other words, after you install TIA on your shell account, running TIA turns your shell
account into a SLIP account for that session. Although a TIA emulated-SLIP account is not
quite the same as a real SLIP account, TIA's SLIP emulation is completely standard in
terms of working with MacTCP-based software on the Mac (or WinSock if you use a
Windows machine). Version 1.1 of TIA, which should be out by the time you read this,
will support PPP as well, which will be even better.
Just to repeat myself then, with the addition of a single Unix program which Cyberspace
Development sells to individuals for $25 (although 1.1 will go up to $35 to help feed the
TIA support staff) or sells to providers for more money, you can turn your plain old shell
account into a whizzy SLIP account and use all of the MacTCP-based software I discuss in
this book. I realize this all sounds a bit like a Ginsu knife commercial (did I mention how
TIA can cut beer cans too?), but TIA has proven itself since its release in the summer of
1994 with over 10,000 single user licenses sold and over 400 host and site licences.
Cyberspace Development estimates that over 100,000 people now connect to the Internet
via TIA.
To use the graphical software 1 discuss later on in the book with a TIA account, you must
still have MacTCP and a version of SUP (or, once TIA 1.1 is out, PPP) installed. Don't
worry about it because MacTCP, InterSLIP, and MacPPP come zvith this book.
Shell Account
Enhance-
ments
Note Note
274 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
TIA has become popular at sites that either aren't commercial or don't have much money
to buy the expensive terminal servers that make real SLIP accounts easily possible. Since
Cyberspace Development sells TIA to individuals, suddenly individual users have the
choice of whether or not they get a SLIP account. Whereas in the past, if the machine
didn't support SLIP, that was the end of the story. I heartily applaud putting power in the
hands of the individual wherever possible; with TIA it's possible!
TIA created a huge fuss when it was first released, primarily on the part of Internet
providers who felt that TIA endangered their business model, but for the most part all
that fuss seems to have disappeared. A very few providers have banned TIA, but for the
most part it has become a fact of life for Internet users previously limited to Unix shell
accounts.
TIA Details
The details that follow about hoio TIA turns your shell account into a SUP account may not
make much sense if you haven't looked through the chapters in part IV yet. Don't zvorry
about it-'just skip the follozoing section unless you're interested in how TIA works.
When you use TIA, you do not get your own IP number that uniquely identifies your Mac
on the Internet while you're connected, as you do with a real SLIP account. Instead, TIA
uses the IP number of the machine your shell account is on, and "redirects" traffic back to
you (this is the magic part). If you must enter an IP number in some software, any number
like 1 . 1 . 1 . 1 should do fine — it's just a dummy address.
The fact that you don't get your own IP number means that you cannot set your Mac up as
an FTP server, for instance, because there's no IP number for an FTP client somewhere else
to connect to.
TlA's performance is reportedly good, faster than normal SLIP in fact, and about as fast as
Compressed SLIP, or CSLIP. Future releases will support CSLIP and even PPP, and will
reportedly increase speed by 10 to 20 percent. TIA doesn't create much of a load for the
host machine, although slightly more than a real SLIP account, mostly because when you
use SLIP, you're not usually running programs on the host machine, but are just using the
network connection.
Installing TIA
Installing TIA on your Unix shell account is not a completely trivial task, since you must
install the proper version for the version of Unix running on your host machine.
Note
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhancements 275
Cyberspace Development has ported TIA to a number of versions of Unix and more
appear all the time (send email to tia-port-info@marketplace.com for a full list). If you
don't know what version of Unix is running on your shell account. Cyberspace Develop-
ment has a simple program that can find out the information for you. Current ports
include those in Table 14.1.
Table 14.1
5^ Shell Account
15. Enhance-
« ments
Operating Systems Supported by TIA
Hardware
Operating System
Sun Sparc
Solaris 2.x
Sun Sparc
SunOS 4.1.x
Sun 3
SunOS 4.1.x
386/486
BSDI 1.0
386/486
BSDIl.l
386/486
SCO
386/486
Linux
DEC MIPS
ULTRIX versions 4.3a (also works with 4.2, 4.4)
DEC ALPHA
OSF/1 2.0 (also works with 3.0)
IBM RS6000
AIX 3.2
SGI
IRIX 4.0 (also works with 5.2)
HP
HP-UX 9.0 (also works with 7.x)
Essentially then, you retrieve the proper version of TIA via FTP, Gopher, or the Web, and
then launch it. (For evaluation purposes, you can get a free version and test it for a
while — contact Cyberspace Development for an evaluation code.) Once TIA is running,
you need to enable SLIP on your Mac, which means having MacTCP and InterSLIP
properly configured.
Actually, unlike most shareware, for which you download the program first, then register,
TIA is generally easier to register first, then download (because of how the license codes
ivork). Cyberspace Development recommends getting an evaluation license code from
marketplace, com (via email or the Web— details following). The code comes with complete
instructions for obtaining the proper version of TIA for your flavor of Unix from
marketplace.com via FTP.
276 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
In normal usage you use a script — a gateway script if you're using InterSLIP — for your
SLIP program to log in to your shell account and then run TIA to start up the SLIP emula-
tion. But it is possible to do it manually as well. In InterSLIP, you'd leave the Dialing and
the Gateway menus set to Direct Connection, log in to your shell account with a terminal
emulator, start TIA, and then quit the terminal emulator, making sure that the terminal
emulator doesn't hang up the phone on quit. Luckily, others have created scripts that
work with TIA, so you may not have to do all the work yourself. Look for this file or
others with TIA in the name in the same directory:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/scr-interslip-tia-netcom.txt
You can order TIA on the Internet itself if you wish (and the Web forms at
marketplace . com are reportedly the easiest method, even via Lynx, a character-based
Web browser that runs on Unix shell accounts). Other mechanisms are available for those
who dislike ordering on the nets. A company called SoftAware sells various versions of
the TIA package along with installation help and consulting (useful for those of you who
aren't familiar with Unix). If nothing else, I suspect working through SoftAware will be
the easiest way for individuals to buy a complete package and be up and running quickly.
Contact SoftAware at single-tia-sales@softaware.com or 310-305-0275. For those who
wish to try setting up and configuring TIA alone, there are several help files available on
the nets. Look for:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/info/hov/-to-tia.txt
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/info/tia-faq.hqx
In addition, Cyberspace Development has created a vast array of informational files
which you can request via email. The easiest way to find out what they have av^ailable is
to send email to tia-directory@marketplace.com. For more basic information about
TIA, send email to tia-info@marketplace.com or connect to marketplace.com over the
Web or via Gopher, FTP, or Telnet:
http://marketplace.com/
gopher://marketplace.com/
ftp: //marketplace. com/tia/
telnet : / /marketplace . com
Eudora
Steve Dorner's free Eudora email program is among the most flexible of communications
programs ever. Eudora was designed to work with MacTCP (and works best in that
environment), so I don't explore the details of using the program until chapter 21,
Note
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhancements Til
"Email." I also mention it in chapter 15, "UUCP Access," because it can work with a
UUCP transport program to read and write email using UUCP. But for the moment, if
your Unix host supports protocols called POP (Post Office Protocol) and SMTP (Simple
Mail Transport Protocol), Eudora can work with the Communications Toolbox that is
standard in System 7 to dial up your Unix host and send and receive email.
J? Shell Account
15* Enhance-
Althoiigh the Communications Toolbox (CTB) code is built into System 7, the CTB tools 5
necessary to use Eudora and many other CTB-aware programs are not included with
System 7. You can get them from your Apple dealer, zvith many communications programs
like SITcomm or MicroPhone II, or on the Internet in:
ftp: / /ftp. support. apple. com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/n_c/comm_toolbox_tools^
The Basic Connectivity Set (BCS) is in disk image format, which is best handled by a disk
image utility called ShrinkWrap, available in:
ftp: //ftp. tidbits. com/ pub/ tidbits /tisk/ut 11/
However, let's go over the details of setting up Eudora to work over the modem. You
might also want to refer to the excellent Eudora documentation available at:
ftp: //ftp. qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/documentation/
Also be sure to poke around in the folder dedicated to storing preconfigured plug-ins for
different providers (which would enable to you avoid the hairy part of the configuration
process) and types of server hardware at:
ftp: //ftp. qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/dialup/
Installation and Setup
There are two drawbacks to using Eudora with the Communications Toolbox. First, it's
slower than via MacTCP. Second, it's flakier, thanks to the reliance on the modem without
PPP or SLIP controlling things. But if it's a choice between suffering with the Unix mail
program or putting up with a few Eudora connection problems, I'll take Eudora any day.
Ask your system administrator if your Unix host supports POP for receiving mail and
SMTP for sending mail, and if so, if she knows of anyone using Eudora on the Macintosh
already. Once one person has customized Eudora to work on a specific machine, the
customized file can work for everyone. Assuming that you're a pioneering sort and the
first one to attempt this task, read on.
278 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
To modify Eudora to work over a CTB connection, you first need a template called Unix
Navs, which you can edit and place in your Eudora Folder, which normally lives in the
System Folder. It's available at:
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.cofn/quest/mac/eudora/dialup/servers/unix.hqx
This template contains the conversation Eudora expects to have with your Unix host to set
up everything. Such send-and-expect conversations are generally called chat scripts and
are most heavily used in the UUCP world. Unfortunately, you must use ResEdit, Apple's
free resource editor, to edit the Unix Navs file. If you don't have ResEdit, you might be
able to get it from a power user friend, your Apple dealer, or in:
ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/utils/
Launch ResEdit and from the File menu select Open. Open the Unix Navs file. Double-
click on the lone STR# resource, then double-click on the Navigate In resource, and the
third window you see should have strings that you can modify (see figure 14.1).
UNIH Nans
STR<»
STR#s from UNI« Naus
Sirf
Nam«
128
62
'"Navigate In"
129
8
"Navigate Mid"
STR^y “Naulgate In” ID " 128 from UNIH Naus M
NuroStrl ngs
I ^
The string
2 )
The string
3)
The string
«4c)tc«)|c
The string
5 ^
\r\r\elogin:
\u\r\es3iuord ;
\b\p\r\r\r\e>
exec spop\r
±
Figure 14.1 Eudora Unix Navs configuration in ResEdit.
If you have the Eudora manual, you can see that my settings differ from the standard
ones that Steve Dorner provides. My Unix machine provided a different prompt, so I had
Note
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhancements 279
to change the third string, and the program named srialpop in his example is named
spop on my machine. You may or may not need to change those lines — I imagine most
people don't.
The first line says Eudora should send two returns (the \ r strings) and then expect (the
\ e string) to see the login : string. The second line says that Eudora should send your j
username (the \u string, determined from a setting inside Eudora itself) and a return, and !
then expect to see ssword which is of course the tail end of "Password:." The third line i
says that Eudora should send your password (\p, again determined inside Eudora) and
three returns, then expect to see the > sign at the end of the prompt (that's what my
prompt looks like anyway; your prompt may look different). The \b tells Eudora not to
send your password to the Progress window, should anyone be watching. Once Eudora
sees the prompt, you're properly logged in. The fourth line says that Eudora should
execute the spop program by sending exec spop and a return. You must ask your
administrator what the name of the spop or srialpop program is on your machine if
neither of those possibilities work.
You might be able to determine if your Unix machine uses either of these programs. Log in
normally, and zohen you're at the Unix prompt, type srialpop or spop. If the machine
complains "Command not found/' you know that's not it If it does something, such as
change the prompt, you may have hit on the right program.
If necessary for your system, you can add another line by clicking on the five asterisks
after a number and going to the Resource menu and choosing Insert New Field(s). After
you have configured these four strings to match your login procedure, save the file and
quit ResEdit.
Next, launch Eudora. Go to the Special menu and choose Settings (see figure 14.2).
Stirted
J Doe
P«rsoo»l Information
f
Hosts
[ 20-1
Checking Mail
Settings
Getting Started
POP Account:
Real Name
I Adam C Engat
Connection Method
O NacTCP
^ Communicationa Toolbox
□ Offli ne ( no connections)
[ Cancel ] [l OK
Shell Account
Enhance-
ments
Figure 14.2 Eudora CTB settings.
Note
280 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The main part to worry about in this dialog is the radio button for Communications
Toolbox, since you want to connect via modem to a Unix shell account rather than via
MacTCP. (Check the Eudora discussion in chapter 21, ''Email," for information on how to
configure the standard parts of Eudora and use the program in general.) Click on the OK
button to save the changes. From the Special menu again, choose Communications (see
figure 14.3).
Figure 14.3 Apple Modem Tool configuration.
Eudora displays the standard Connection Settings configuration dialog. First, from the
Method pop-up menu, choose Apple Modem Tool. If you don't have it, get it from a
friend, your dealer, or the Internet, because it's supposedly the only one that works with
Eudora. It's hidden in with the Communicate Lite demo in:
ftp: //ftp. tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/term/
ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/n_c/comm_tooibox_tools/
Type your host machine's phone number in the Dial Phone Number field. From the
Modem pop-up menu, choose your modem or, if it's not listed, one from the same manu-
facturer, and failing that, one from Hayes. If all else fails, you can choose the Custom
option in that pop-up menu and configure it yourself (this means figuring out the proper
initialization string with the help of your modem manual). Finally, check the Port Settings
to make sure your modem is talking at the right speed with No Parity, 8 Data Bits, 1 Stop
Bit, and the appropriate Handshaking for your modem and cable (usually DTR & CTS or
CTS Only). After you're done, click the OK button to save your settings.
Three things are important for using Eudora in dialup mode. First, you must have a modem
with either hardware or software error correction. Dropping a single character at the zorong
time can kill the POP and SMTP protocols on ivhich Eudora relies. Second, the remote host
must have hardware flow control that actually works, which isn't always true, and unfortu-
nately you have little or no control over this. Third, you must configure the Mac properly
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhaucements 281
and knoio your model's limitations, Steve Domer suggests using software error control even
if the modem supports hardware error correction on PowerBooks with high-speed modems
using the Apple Modem Tool 1.5, because the small hardware buffer in the serial chip can
overflow at times.
a
Now comes the fun part — troubleshooting. From the File menu, choose Check Mail to ^
make Eudora to dial out and retrieve your mail. Eudora displays a progress dialog at the
top of the screen that shows what's happening, one line at a time. Those lines flash by
quickly, though, so watch carefully so you can see where it might get stuck (if your host
actually requires more information during login, for instance). If you're lucky, it works on
the first try, but don't count on it. If it works, you should read the section on Eudora in
chapter 21 to figure out how to use the rest of the program. If it doesn't work, retrace your
steps, try to figure what's going wrong, and if all else fails, try asking on the newsgroup
comp . sys . mac . comm because many experienced Eudora users hang out there.
There's also a Eudora mailing list you can join, which is probably the best place to ask for
help if you're having trouble. To subscribe, send email to majordomo@qualcomm.com with
subscribe mac-eudora-forum in the body of the message. Make sure that your return
address is correct — it's the address that will be added to the mailing list.
A Major Kludge
If all else fails, long-time Macintosh user and net citizen Murph Sewall posted this ex-
tremely clever suggestion. It's a major kludge, but if it works for Murph, it might work for
you. First, download Tim Endres' Termy terminal emulator. It's in:
ftp: / /ftp. tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/term/
Then, configure both Termy and Eudora to use the Serial tool (not the Apple Modem
Tool, as Eudora would normally want). When you want to connect, launch Termy, open a
terminal window, and dial your modem by hand to connect with your Unix host. Proceed
through the login normally until you get to the prompt that wants you to telnet to your
POP server. Close Termy's terminal window. Since you're using the Serial tool, the
modem should stay connected, and if it doesn't, check your modem initialization string
to make sure the modem ignores DTR (usually something like &D0). After you close
Termy's window, switch to Eudora and use it as you normally would. Murph notes that
you may have to use ResEdit to modify a resource that controls the format the Telnet
command — the instructions for that are in the appendix of the Eudora manual.
When you're done, you either can open a new terminal window in Termy to log out or
you may be able to get the Eudora NavigateOut resource properly configured to log out
for you (but if you could do that, one would think you could get the Navigatein resource
properly configured as well). The more I think about it, the more I think this is a serious
hack, but you might even be able to automate it with a program like QuicKeys if you have
to use it.
Shell Account
Enhance-
ments
282 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Other Shell Enhancements
Although most of the programs I talk about in this section can be cajoled into working, for
the most part they aren't terribly easy to set up. And, for those that are easy to set up,
there isn't usually much power behind the basic interface. That said, people do use and
like these programs, so if setting up TIA isn't possible or feasible and you want to do
more than just email via Eudora, check out some of these programs. Unless mentioned
otherwise, all the programs below are at the following URL:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/term/
Eudora SFU
Ray Davison of Simon Fraser University has modified
an old version (1.4.2) of Eudora to be even more
scriptable than the normal version of Eudora using the
C- language. I haven't tried to use this version at all,
because I had no trouble with Eudora’s relatively
simple setup, but If you have a particularly weird
configuration that you must script around and you
=
Ld
Eudora 1 .4.2 SFU
don't mind using a slightly older version of Eudora, it
might be worth checking out.
ftp://ftp.sfu.ca/pub/mac/eudora/
Homer
The $25 shareware program Homer from Toby Smith
comes In two forms — one for MacTCP-based connec-
tions and one for those who have only a Unix shell
account. Homer is primarily used via a MacTCP-based
connection, but suffice it to say that if you plan on
using IRC and you have a Mac, Homer is the way to go.
The serial version of Homer has a number of limita-
tions not shared by the MacTCP version. First off, It’s
not compatible with the Communications Toolbox,
which means you cannot use any Macintosh that uses
a GeoPort Telecom Adapter instead of a modem (the
GeoPort Telecom Adapter only works with the
Communications Toolbox). Second, you must use a
Unix account— no other operating systems will work —
that can telnet out to a remote host. Third, some
versions of Telnet simply don’t cooperate with Homer
and echo back everything you say and generally won’t
work properly.
Internet Email and Internet News
Microphone Pro 2.0’s Internet Mail and Internet News
modules both use MicroPhone Pro’s scripting language
and both work over either a MacTCP connection or,
more Interestingly, a dialup connection to a shell
account. They have similar, easy-to-use interfaces.
Internet Mail is an offline mail reader — you read and
write email offline and then connect to send replies
and receive new messages. Unfortunately, Internet
News is not an offline newsreader.
At about $150, Microphone Pro is relatively expensive,
and I wouldn’t buy It just for Internet Mall and Internet
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhancements 283
News. Although these modules seem to work pretty
well, there are a number of rough edges. More
seriously, Internet Mail and Internet News, because of
their heritage as MicroPhone Pro scripts, are slow as
molasses, not in transfers so much as in basic
execution. However, on the positive side, they’re
easier to set up than Eudora and most of the
newsreaders, and if you do want MicroPhone Pro
anyway, they’re a welcome addition. You can contact
Software Ventures at microphone@svcdudes . com
or 510-644-3232.
1 in nlt.liuonivi iiiiq
i FmI I Onn ^ StM 1 txtTMf 1 Untrk ^ Hiric A-’l I 1
i ^
Q U nt* ci» Ajo
□ «4b4*IW^i,«.es» JHW MU
Q v*n« t« 9*1 v><oKiwn»rM4ing(r*plj} Rifh*M
*-d
http://www.svcdudes.com/
MacNews
Matt Hall’s $15 shareware MacNews provides a
graphical interface for reading Usenet news even if you
have only a shell account. The only requirements are
that your machine run an NNTP (Net News Transport
Protocol) server or that your machine be able to
contact one over the Internet. MacNews is decidedly a
work-in-progress, and it lacks enough features that you
may not want to lose all those you enjoy in a Unix
newsreader In terms of reading and killing threads. On
the other hand, the ability to use cut and paste and
look at a Macintosh interface may outweigh the
disadvantages.
'hW'S"' rE.:.- i:;: Ei .u, ^ Riiicles vl, IT
2270 List of nod«rators for Usorot
2271 0>3r>9M to Mow to Construct tho rtaitpoths FI I*
2272 Chon^ to List of nodorators for Us«ri«t
t
2373 List of Actios Hsssgroccs. Port 1
2274 List of Actios Mossgroupt, Port 11
2275 Altsrnotivs Msssgrouo Hisrorcniss, Port 1
2276 Altorrativs Mswtoroup HisrcrcMss. Port II
Path. n«nsxustuunstlnot-for-soi I
Fro* talstuunst uu.nst tOouid C Lowsncs)
hsssgroups:
nsss. 1 lsts.nsss.gr ots>s,n**s omouncs nsoussrs, n**f onnounc* nssigroups.nsss onswi
rs
Suojsct List of Activs Msssorouos, Port 1
SupsTSsOss: <spaf>octlos-733SOOSI2Pcs purdus.sOu*
Follosup-To. n**s groups
Oats; 23 Jul 1903 17:23 2t -0400
Orgonizotlon UUCT Tschnologiss Inc, Falls Church, W, USA
LInss: 667
Approusd talsPuunst uu not
Expiros 22 Ssp 93 09:23 17 GUT
Mstsogs-ID: <tals-octlus_743462S97PiAr'*t.uu nst>
f#«TP-fof ting-nost; rodcn uu nst
ScB*orv First of two postings. This contains Ihs •ntroduction, and ths
groups in casp, *isc, and n*ws
MacSOUP
Stefan Kurth’s MacSOUP is a bit of an odd program in
that it requires the use of a program called uqwk on
your Unix account to provide offline news and mail
reading from a shell account. I have no idea how
common or easily installed uqwk might be. That said,
uqwk was already installed on my Unix shell account,
and the commands provided in MacSOUP’s excellent
documentation worked perfectly for creating a soup
packet file containing all my mail and the messages in
the newsgroups I read, and then downloading that file
for use on the Mac. In my brief testing, MacSOUP
worked well, and its interface, although a touch clumsy
in spots, was easy to use and generally well done. If
you have uqwk on your Unix account (try typing the
command to see if you get a response) or can easily
Install it. I’d recommend that you take a look at
MacSOUP.
Neursqtoups
t«t*l
halcyon. announce
12
12
holcyon.sllp
234
234
comp. sys. mac. onnounce
4
4
comp. sys. newt on. announce
4
4
Seattle. eats
95
103
Main nailbox
0
2
Outgoing flan & News 4
Shell Account
Enhance-
ments
Note
284 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
N e ws W atcher-SFU
Ray Davison of Simon Fraser University has modified
an old version (2.0dl7) of John Norstad’s excellent
NewsWatcher program to work over a serial line,
much like Eudora. I haven’t tried configuring this
newsreader, in large part because it sounds like it’s
a bit harder than would be ideal, but it works on very
NewsWatcher-SFU
much the same lines as Eudora SFU and requires the
same sort of chat script edited in ResEdit.
f tp : / /f tp. sf u . ca/pub/mac/nev.fswatcher/
TheNews
I want to like Bill Cramer’s $25 shareware program
TheNews because of Its flexibility. Like Eudora, it can
work with shell accounts, UUCP accounts, and
MacTCP-based connections. However, I have trouble
with TheNews every time I try to use it, so I won’t
look at it in detail. I'll settle for warning you that
TheNews is slow to start up, at least over a MacTCP-
based connection, because it seemingly downloads
the full list of newsgroups every time you launch the
program. It’s also memory-hungry — It comes
configured to use 1.300K In the Finder’s Get Info
window, but It crashed when I tried to sort the full
group list until I doubled that number.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Terminal Emulators
I don't want to get into reviewing all of the possible terminal emulation programs avail-
able for the Macintosh because there are a ton of them. However, you must have a termi-
nal emulator to talk to a Unix machine, so here are some capsule reviews for those I've
heard of and/or used.
A number of these terminal emulators work through the Communications Toolbox and
require CTB tools. Luckily, except for Termy, they all ship zuith a full complement. You can
find additional freely distributed tools in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/ctb/
ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/n_c/comm_toolbox__tools/
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhancements 285
Communicate and Communicate Lite
Communicate and Communicate Lite are relatively
simple terminal emulators from Mark/Space
Softworks that use the Communications Toolbox.
Communicate Lite Is pretty much bare-bones terminal
emulation; the more powerful Communicate adds
features such as an In/Out box for queuing up
uploads and downloads, scripting via AppleScript
or Frontier, automated virus detection, and spell
checking via Apple events. Contact Mark/Space
Softworks at mspace@netcom.com. You can find
a demo of Communicate Lite that has the Save,
Save As, Open, and Session Directory commands
disabled in the below URL.
&>
ftp: / /ftp. tidbits .com/pub /tidbit s/tisk/ term/
Crosstalk for Macintosh
I know little about DCA’s Macintosh version of the
popular PC Crosstalk communications programs,
except for the fact that it is CTB-aware and comes
with a slew of CTB tools (22 tools for emulating
different terminals and 15 tools for transfer proto-
cols). If you’re having trouble finding a terminal
emulator to emulate a specific type of terminal, it
might be worth checking out Crosstalk for Macintosh.
Crosstalk also has its own powerful scripting
language and generally costs about $120 (mail
order).
Microphone
Microphone is probably the most popular terminal
emulation package on the Macintosh. It comes in a
number of different forms, including MicroPhone LT
for about $40, Microphone II 5.0 for about $120, and
MicroPhone Pro 2.0 (which includes fax software and
various Internet tools such as Snatcher and Fetch) for
about $150. MicroPhone is a powerful, fully laden
terminal emulator with its own scripting language.
Contact Software Ventures at 510-644-3232 or
microphone@svcdudes.com.
http: //v/ww. svcdudes.com/
Shell Account
Enhance-
ments
286 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
SITcomm
Aladdin Systems came out with SITcomm early In
1994, and It won a loyal following Immediately
because it's a small, relatively simple terminal
emulator that still sports some neat features.
SITcomm Is completely CTB-aware and comes with all
the connection and transfer tools that you might
want. Perhaps most importantly, though, SITcomm is
completely Apple event-driven, which means that you
can script it in either AppleScript or Frontier and you
can even record AppleScript or Frontier scripts from
within SITcomm. SITcomm’s cool features Include a
slick address book that simplifies connecting to many
commercial services, automatic compression and
expansion using Aladdin’s Stuffit technology, and
voice feedback. SITcomm costs about $50 (mail
order), and you can contact Aladdin at
aladdinOwell . sf . ca . us or 408-761-6200.
Termy
Termy is an extremely simple, free terminal emulator
from Tim Endres, the programmer behind InterCon’s
UUCP/Connect and the free TGE TCP Tool. Termy
doesn’t do much on its own but is CTB-aware, so if
you have Communications Toolbox tools, you can
use them with Termy for a basic terminal emulation
solution. You will need the basic CTB tools for Termy.
NeuJ Terminal r -T '
login, orcnia
Lost login Sun lk»- it 17:23:36 Iron dr«i2.<lna.stthoM
SunOS Ralaota t.t.3 <HVF«LRTHOTEP) «3 Thu npr 22 15:26:21 EOT 19»3
UalcoM to Rrchial
Oaralon 3.2.2
SURAnat la plaaead to ormounca tha ralaasa of orchia alth a naa \.<arslon of
archie aoftvora.
If you naad halo elth tha Interoctive ellant type 'help* at tha 'oH:hla>'
proept. 11 you ryr^a any quaftlona, plaosa raod help >>FIRST<<, than If
your quaiticn aaa not onswarad send a-noM to •orchla*odain*aura.nat'
orchla-odain
<Jonuary 23., IB9S>
■ Bunyip Inforaaticn Systaat, 1903. 1094
a Taralnol type sat to 'nataork 24 66'
• ' arose' choroetar is "?'
a 'search' <typa strir.g> has tha uolua 'sub'.
orchia*
'(ii
O Tarmy - Ralassa 2.1 VTIttanby Tim Cndrai. |
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/terni/
VersaTerm
:: UersnTBfm ♦ QIC UIZ20 ♦ ‘UnHHtd' L T . 7 J
VersaTerm has garnered a reputation among those
who know for having the most solid terminal
emulations, especially for the stranger types of
graphics terminals from Tektronix. The $120
VersaTerm itself supports a number of emulation
modes, and the $170 VersaTerm Pro adds even
more emulations. Both programs come with the
VersaTilities, a collection of TCP/IP tools and
utilities, which you can also buy separately for about
$85 (all prices mail order). Contact Synergy at
maxwell6sales . synergy . com for more
Information.
C<Dt 9S0/39e I 1 (<i''l*ga-2.ca«ouMr‘(f«.cca>
Ccrirecltd la CcaauSa-^e
Ncit Ham CIS
This gataaa^' otiass ••■bars la oacam tha Cea(i.S*''ja Infarsat Icr Sarvica
diractly Trca tha Inlarnal,
II y«u era o CcapuSarua ■•■bs- a-^i aish to occata tHa InforMt icr>
Sarvlce re«, er -i you haua a CawjSa-va llaafcaMhJp, ar If you ho«ja o
Culda erd alth to sign up fa- a ZaapiSarva Itaabarsiip Ktl, antar LCCCh
ond thar praai tfia Enlar or Ralji-n kay.
If you cat Ira cdl-t'onal >nfo-aallan ahou*. CoapuSa-ua, aata- HCIP end
than praat the Entar or Fatu-a aay.
If ycu alfh to ta-ainata thia eoanasllon. antar O^F aad than press tha
Enter or Faturr key
Enter chetca (tOOOH, HEtF, O^F) |
Chapter 14 ♦ Shell Account Enhancements
287
ZTerm
Although not CTB-aware, ZTerm has gained a loyal
following among telecommunications users because
of its simple interface and speedy ZMODEM transfer
protocol. ZTerm is shareware from Dave Alverson and
is available at the below URL.
■' -1— — — ~ z: Ml
$
^ Shell Account
3. Enhance-
« menls
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/term/
Shell-Shocked
If many of the programs Tve talked about in this chapter seem like fairly serious hacks,
well, you're right, for the most part they are. I wouldn't really recommend that you kill
yourself trying to use any of these programs other than TIA and Eudora in CTB mode, or
possibly MacSOUP. The others, although potentially useful if you can get them working
fairly easily, simply aren't worth much effort. TIA is definitely the best choice, because
once you've got it installed on your shell account and MacTCP and InterSLIP properly
configured, you can skip right ahead and read about all the issues relating to MacTCP
accounts and programs. Otherwise, you should delve a bit deeper into the other possibili-
ties mentioned previously.
It's time to move on to another way you can connect to the Internet, the UUCP account.
Although old and a bit clunky, UUCP connections to the Internet are still useful and
extremely efficient ways to use email and Usenet news.
UUCP Access
[This page intentionally left blank.]
290 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Where' d It Go?
Hey! What happened to my chapter! 1 know 1 left it here last night and then when I got up
this morning, it was gone. Police!
Actually, there was no foul play. There's a reasonable, if unfortunate explanation for the
reason why the UUCP chapter simply isn't here anymore. Although in previous editions
of the book UUCP was more important because MacTCP connections were relatively hard
to find, that's no longer true. Nowadays it's probably quite a bit harder to find a UUCP
connection. Even still, 1 was successfully resisting pressure to eliminate the chapter,
arguing that it was useful to some people.
Then the blow came. The book was 70 pages too long, and because paper prices have
skyrocketed since the first and second editions came out, page count has become a big
deal. Hayden wanted to keep the price of the book the same, $30, but to do so required
that those 70 pages bite the dust. Selflessly, and without showing weakness, the UUCP
sacrificed itself so that the other chapters could reach the public. Now if only I could get
that melancholy theme music to play right about now...
In return for removing the UUCP information from the book, Hayden has allowed me to
do what I want with the existing text. I realize that you may not have any email access at
the moment, at which point 1 can't help you. If you do have email access, send email to
uucp-chapter@tidbits . com to receive an auto-reply message that tells you how and in
what formats you can get the text of the UUCP chapter. Very few changes were made
from the previous editions of the book since UUCP software is essentially static right
now, so if you have one of the previous editions, don't worry about it.
My most sincere apologies for having to remove this information.
A Quick Reminder about UUCP
Although by no means the snazziest method of connecting to the Internet, UUCP access is
often the most efficient for basic email and news, because it's inherently a noninteractive
process. Your host machine sends messages to your Mac in the form of files, which the
UUCP software then processes for display. This process accounts for the acronym as well.
UUCP stands for Unix-to-Unix CoPy (the copy command in Unix is cp).
With a UUCP connection, you connect only to send or receive information. When you
read news or write a reply to an email message, your modem is not connected and
racking up connect charges. UUCP appeared in the days of the 300 bps modem. Although
it has scaled up just fine to faster connections, even direct Internet connections, it still
works well at slower speeds, because the actual connection time is usually relatively
short.
Again, if you wish to read the UUCP chapter, send email to uucp-chapter@tidbits.com
to find out how to get it.
Note
Part
Full Internet Access
We've finally hit the really good stuff! I titled this part of the book "Full Internet
Access" because everything else we've talked about so far has either been back-
ground material or has been somehow limited. With full Internet access, as dis-
cussed in this section, you will find that your only limitations are how fast your
modem can go if you need to use a PPP or SLIP connection, and how much time you
want to spend using the Internet.
PPP and SLIP are communication protocols that fool your MacTCP-equipped
Macintosh into thinking that it's attached to a network that connects to the Internet.
Instead of that network, SLIP and PPP enable the Mac to communicate over a modem,
which is good because most individuals don't have access to networks connected to the
Internet.
chapter 16, Internet Starter Kit
Disk
All of the chapters in Part IV, "Full Internet Access/' rely on your having a full,
MacTCP-based Internet connection. The easiest way to get such a connection is to
use the software I've included for you on the ISKM disk, and use the ISKM Installer
to install it for you. Different configurations are provided for use with the Internet
Starter Kit Providers (see appendix A for a full list), but of course, the softw^are
works with any Internet provider who offers PPP or SLIP accounts, or even with any
dedicated Internet connection. Chapter 16, "Internet Starter Kit Disk," explains
exactly what the ISKM Installer installs, where it installs the various files, and all of
those good details that you probably wish other installers provided for you.
Chapter 17, MacTCP
MacTCP is the most necessary piece of the puzzle, because without MacTCP, none
of the programs mentioned from here on will work well or at all. Although it
requires some configuring, MacTCP is really quite simple. The ISKM Installer
prevents you from needing to do much at all. But the details of exactly how you
configure MacTCP are of interest, especially if something doesn't work right.
Chapter 17, "MacTCP," takes you through configuring MacTCP, reveals the nasty
little details of how certain confusing parts of the interface work, and finishes with a
look at a few useful MacTCP utilities.
chapter 18, PPP
MacTCP by itself won't make your Internet connection, though, and for that you
need either a direct Internet connection via a network, or a modem and either PPP or
SLIP. I recommend PPP to most people, and if your Internet access provider sup-
ports PPP, it's the best way to go. In chapter 18, "PPP," I go through the steps of
configuring MacPPP, the freeware version of PPP installed by the ISKM Installer,
and then take a look at some other implementations of PPP and PPP utilities.
chapter 19, SLIP
Although I recommend PPP, SLIP is still in wide use and it's functionally identical
to PPP in terms of you being able to use the same programs. You must have a
different sort of account, a SLIP account, of course, but if that's all your provider
offers (often through The Internet Adapter, or TIA, which I discussed back in
chapter 14, ''Shell Account Enhancements"), then SLIP should work fine for you. I
work through the steps for configuring InterSLIP, a free, although unsupported,
implementation of SLIP from InterCon Systems, and then briefly look at other
implementations of SLIP and some SLIP utilities.
chapter 20, Troubleshooting
Your Connection
Murphy's Law is right up there with gravity as one of the fundamental forces in the
universe. I won't pretend that your connection will necessarily work perfectly on the
first tr)', despite our best efforts. In those unfortunate cases, the best help I can
provide is in chapter 20, "Troubleshooting Your Connection," where I outline, in the
traditional and time-honored form of a FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) list, all the
questions and answers that I know. I'm really not holding back on you here — this
chapter contains everything I can think of that might go wrong and the solution,
assuming there is one. Do read through this carefully, and even if you're using
MacPPP, say, scan through the InterSLIP section to see if a similar problem to yours
may have been reported and solved for InterSLIP. Troubleshooting is a great mys-
tery game in which no one dies, so just take a deep breath, put on your deerstalker
cap, and read on for all the clues to solving your problem.
Chapters 21 through 25, 27, & 28
Finally! On to the MacTCP-based programs. Chapter 21, "Email," starts you off by
discussing client programs for using email, the ubiquitous Internet service. Of
course, with Qualcomm's excellent Eudora in the field, none of the rest can even
compete, so I concentrate on Eudora (which is included on the ISKM disk). Chapter
22, "Usenet News," moves on to a more congested area and looks at the main Usenet
newsreaders available for the Macintosh. NewsWatcher, Nuntius, and NewsHopper
are all in the ring, and it's up to you choose which you prefer. Chapter 23, "FTP,"
also presents a few choices, with Anarchie (which is included on the ISKM disk) and
Fetch vying for the crown. To me, it's fairly obvious that Anarchie is the overall
winner, with Fetch and Softw^are Ventures' Snatcher being useful primarily in
specific situations. Chapter 24, "Gopher," has shrunk from previous editions, thanks
to the rise of the World Wide Web and the resulting drop in importance of Gopher
clients. It's down to TurboGopher now, although I do look at a few Gopher-related
programs as well, including the extremely cool TurboGopher VR. Chapter 25,
"World Wide Web," expanded as the Gopher section contracted, since the Web gets
more attention than any other part of the Internet these days. I look at the main Web
browsers, MacWeb (which is included on the ISKM disk) and Netscape.
You probably noticed my skipping over diapter 26 in the previous list; that's
because chapter 26, "Creating Your Web Page," is a chapter of a different color (not
literally) and although it follows on the heels of chapter 25's discussion of Web
browsers, it deserves it's own description.
Meanwhile, back at chapter 27, "Utilities & Miscellany," I hit a slew of square
programs that simply don't fit into the nice round holes of my organization. I'm
talking about things like the videoconferencing application CU-SeeMe, Timbuktu
Pro (which enables you to observe or control other Macs over the Internet), and the
tank game Bolo. I've managed to break them up into some rough groups, but even
still, it's a bit of a hodgepodge. Chapter 28, "Integrated Programs," goes 180 degrees
in the other direction and talks about a couple of programs, TCP /Connect II from
InterCon and VersaTerm-Link from Synergy, that integrated a number of Internet
functions into a single program.
Chapter 26, Creating Your Web
Page
As I mentioned previously, the Web is where the action is on the Internet these days,
and I recognize that you probably want a piece of that action. So, in an effort to
provide you with the best and tastiest information about HTML, the language of the
Web, I drafted my lovely wife Tonya, who's the HTML expert in the family, to write
chapter 26, "Creating Your Web Page." The chapter takes you through all the basic
parts of HTML that you need to know to create your own Web page, giving ex-
amples along the way. Also, since this is a Macintosh book, Tonya looks at the basics
of dealing with graphics on the Web through Macintosh-colored glasses. If you've
struggled with some of the quirks and confusions while trying to create a Web page,
this chapter is for you. It doesn't attempt to be a brain-dead tutorial since those are
always both boring and pointless — you want to create your Web page, not some
example. The chapter also doesn't attempt to provide a stilted and alphabetically
organized reference to all the HTML tags — such references are available online on
the Web (and we've got a compact one in appendix C, "HTML Tags"). Instead,
chapter 26 combines the best of both approaches, concisely explaining all the impor-
tant HTML tags in the order in which you're likely to need them while creating your
own Web page.
chapter 29, Step-by-Step
Internet
In response to suggestions from readers of the first edition, I created this chapter to
walk you through, step by numbered step, the absolute basics of using the main
MacTCP-based Internet programs. Most of them arc on the disk, and all are dis-
cussed elsewhere in the book. You should turn to this chapter if you're having
trouble with the basics of how to send email, or how to browse the Web. Most of the
time the problems are extremely simple, and once you get over the first hump,
you're on your way.
Note
Chapter
Internet Starter
Kit Disk
The disk that comes with Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh contains all the software you
need to access the Internet! The software is compressed (using Aladdin's excellent Stuffit
InstallerMaker) so that it can fit on a single high-density Macintosh disk. To install any or
all of these programs, double-click on the ISKM Installer icon. See the following text for a
detailed list of what's installed by each option in the ISKM Installer.
If you receive a disk that your Mac rejects, call Hayden/Macmillan Computer Publishing at
800-858-7674 or 317-581-7674. Do note that the disk is a 1.4 MB disk— it will not loork in
800K drives used in very old Macs (the Plus, some SEs, and the Mac II).
The ISKM disk includes:
■ MacTCP 2.0.6, which enables your Macintosh to run MacTCP-based Internet
programs.
■ MacPPP 2.0.1, which enables you to use a modem to connect to a PPP account at
your Internet access provider.
■ InterSLIP 1.0.1, which enables you to use a modem to connect to a SLIP account at
your Internet access provider, if they offer only SLIP.
Note
298 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
■ Anarchie 1.5, the best FTP client for any computer.
■ Eudora 1.5.1, a powerful program that enables you to send and receive Internet
email.
■ Internet Config 1.1, which centralizes preferences like your email address for a
number of Internet programs.
■ MacWeb 1.00A3.2, an excellent browser for the World Wide Web that takes you to
the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh Home Page by default.
■ Stuffit Expander 3.5.2, which can debinhex and expand the files you download from
the Internet.
■ Bookmarks for retrieving the latest versions of all the major Internet programs that I
couldn't fit on the disk.
■ Customized MacTCP Prep files for all the Internet Starter Kit Providers listed in
appendix A.
/ recommend that you make a backup copy of the ISKM Installer in case anything should go
xurong with your master copy. To do thiSj simply copy the ISKM Installer file from the ISKM
disk to your hard disk. You can then copy it to another floppy disk if you want.
There's More...
But wait! Lest I sound too much like a late-night Ginsu knife commercial (has anyone ever
bought one of those to cut beer cans?), I have in fact done even more.
ftp.tidbits.com
As I noted previously, I have bookmarks to the major Internet programs so you can
download any one of them with merely a double-click of the mouse. But what if you want
one of the less-popular programs, or simply want to check out what else is available?
Have I got an FTP site for you...
I seem to have collected about 50 MB of software in the course of my testing, so including
even 25 disks would barely have been enough, and they would have made the book kind
of bulky. So, I had a talk with the folks at Northwest Nexus, and they agreed to set up an
FTP site for me that everyone on the Internet could access. This way, you will have a
single site to visit for all of your Macintosh Internet applications and utilities.
The FTP site is called ftp . tidbits . com, and you can use any standard method of access-
ing an anonymous FTP site. Just use anonymous as your username and your email address
Note
Chapter 16 ♦ Internet Starter Kit Disk 299
as your password. If the machine rejects your full email address as a password, try using
just your username and an @ sign, as in ace@; sometimes this particular FTP server is a bit
finicky.
Here's a quick tutorial on connecting to the FTP site after you have installed and config-
ured MacTCP (and MacPPP or InterSLIP, if necessary) and Anarchie, by using Internet
Config. Connect to the Internet. Launch Anarchie. If your Bookmarks window doesn't
appear automatically, from the File menu choose List Bookmarks. Scroll down in the list
until you see TidBITS, and then double-click on that bookmark and then go into the "tisk"
folder (it's a hold-over from the first edition, which I referred to in shorthand as TISK, for
The Internet Starter Kit). Alternately, use the shortcuts I've set up for you with the book-
marks for ISKM HTML Programs, ISKM Internet Utility Programs, and ISKM MacTCP-
based Programs that are higher up in the Bookmarks window.
Internet
When you double-click on one of these bookmarks, Anarchie connects to ^ starter Kit
ftp . tidbits . com, switches into the proper directory, and lists the files. From there you
can navigate around in the different folders by double-clicking on them. Double-clicking
on a file retrieves it. It's that easy.
ISKM Home Page
The bookmarks and the FTP site are all fine and nice, but the more alert among my
reading audience are no doubt asking themselves, "But how am I going to figure out that
there's a new version of MacWeb, or Eudora, or whatever? And heck, how am I going to
find anything I want on the Internet anyway?" Good question, alert readers, and the
simple answer is that you'll use MacWeb or another Web browser to connect to the ISKM
Home Page at:
http :/ /w\'/w . mcp . com/ hayden / iskm/
I've set the copy of MacWeb on the ISKM disk to connect to this page by default. However, if
you've set a different home page in MacWeb previously, or ivish to use Netscape or another
Web browser, you can stilt use the URL for the ISKM Home Page as your default home page.
All the programs have various ways, usually located in the Preferences, of setting a default
home page.
The ISKM Home Page has a number of links to the most important sites on the Internet,
catalogs of resources like Yahoo, search engines like WebCrawler, important FTP sites like
Info-Mac and UMich, and even a few of the major companies in the Macintosh industry,
such as Apple and Microsoft. These links should be your starting point for any explora-
tion of the Internet, and rest assured that if I find additional sites that I consider equally
as useful. I'll add them.
Note
300 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
In addition, at the top of the ISKM Home Page is a link, called ''ISKM Macintosh Internet
Software Updates," to another Web page that continually tracks the latest versions of all
the main Internet applications for the Macintosh (so stop in every now and then and see
what's changed). You can use your Anarcliie bookmarks to retrieve any of these pro-
grams, or you can use a Web browser (although Anarchie is better at retrieving files).
Again, these pages are a public Internet resource and anyone, whether or not they've
bought the book, is welcome to use them. If you find them useful. I'm glad, and I hope
they might inspire you to think what you could contribute to the net someday.
ISKM Installer
I designed the ISKM Installer to be as easy as possible to use. I tried to think of the differ-
ent things you might want to do with the various files on the disk, which is why I created
several different installer options.
The ISKM Installer will not ovenoritc any existing files— if you want to replace a file such
as MacTCP, you must first move it out of the System Polder manually, along with MacTCP
DNR and MacTCP Prep, This is imperative if you have installed Apple's System 7,5 (which
comes with MacTCP), if you are switching from SUP to PPP, or if you have already used
some of this software previously and wish to take advantage of the disk's included preferences
and configurations.
How to Install
As with most installers, using the ISKM Installer is a piece of cake. First, restart your
Macintosh while holding down the Shift key. This process disables all of your extensions
until you restart. Although not absolutely necessary, it's a good idea to do this to ensure
that anti-virus software or other extensions don't interfere with the installation process
(which they sometimes do).
Insert the ISKM floppy disk in your drive, and when the window comes up, double-click
on the file called ISKM Installer. You should see the ISKM Installer splash screen. Click
the Continue button. Next, the ISKM Installer presents you with a screen full of text that
describes what the various options available in the ISKM Installer do, and offers other
useful information. Read this information, and if you want, save or print it by clicking the
Save or Print buttons. Then click the Continue button. The ISKM Installer then presents
you with the Standard Install dialog (see figure 16.1).
Chapter 16 ♦ Internet Starter Kit Disk 301
wr
Full MocPPP Install
Installs MacTCP and MacPPP in your
actiue System Folder. Also Installs the
ISKM applications and a folder of
MacTCP Prep files for the Internet
Starter Kit Proulders.
lnsUIU^M 2098>;
[ Custom ] [ Quit 1 ll Install J
Figure 16,1 ISKM Installer Standard Install dialog,
Here's where you must make your first decision.
■ If you want to use MacPPP, select the standard Full MacPPP Install, which installs <
all the applications and MacTCP and MacPPP, along with all of the MacTCP Prep
files for the Internet Starter Kit Providers. A partially configured PPP Preferences
file containing some modem configurations is also installed for you. Contact your
provider for the information necessary to finish configuring MacPPP and the rest of
the applications.
■ If you want to use InterSLIP instead of MacPPP, click the Custom button in the
ISKM Installer and select Full InterSLIP Install. This installs all of the applications,
MacTCP, and InterSLIP, and a number of dialing and gateway scripts to use as
examples. Contact your provider for the information necessar)* to finish configuring
MacTCP, InterSLIP, and the rest of the applications. Thoughtful providers may have
an InterSLIP gateway script already created for you.
■ If you want to install any one or more of the individual programs, click the Custom
button in the ISKM Installer and select the appropriate option. You can select more
than one at a time by Command-clicking on them. Of course, if this is your first
installation, installing individual programs won't provide all the pieces you need
to access the Internet.
The most likely option is Full MacPPP Install, and if that's what you want to do, click the
Install button. The ISKM Installer informs you that you must restart your computer after
installing and asks if you would like to continue.
If you have any unsaved work open in other applications, click the No button and then
the Quit button back in the Standard Install dialog. Save your work, quit the other appli-
cations, and repeat the steps to this point. When you are ready to install, click the Yes
button when the ISKM Installer asks about restarting. Next, you're presented with a
Standard File dialog that enables you to locate the ISKM3 Folder anywhere on your hard
disk that you like.
Internot
Starter Kit
Disk
302 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
After you choose a location and click the Save button, the ISKM Installer proceeds to
install everything, and when it's done, it informs you that everything has been installed
correctly and forces you to click on a Restart button. Click it, and after your computer
restarts, you're ready to configure the software that was installed for you.
Configuring MacTCP
There are two possibilities at this point. First, if you're not working with one of the
Internet Starter Kit Providers listed in appendix A, contact your provider for the informa-
tion you need to configure MacTCP. Read chapter 17, "MacTCP," and chapter 29, "Step-
by-Step Internet," for instructions on how to actually perform the configuration (and
follow them up with either chapter 18, "PPP," or chapter 19, "SLIP," depending on which
you use). If you run into trouble, first read chapter 20, "Troubleshooting Your Connec-
tion," and then turn to your provider for help.
Second, if you are working with one of the Internet Starter Kit Providers listed in appen-
dix A, configuring MacTCP is trivial. In your ISKM3 Folder, find the folder called Cus-
tomized MacTCP Prep Files. In it are a number of folders, each named for one of the
Internet Starter Kit Providers. Within each of these folders is a MacTCP Prep file.
Next, open your System Folder and see if you have a MacTCP DNR file. If you do, throw
it out. MacTCP creates a new one when you restart anyway, and you don't want any old
configurations hanging around.
Still inside your System Folder, open your Preferences folder. Make sure you are in View
by Name mode in the Finder (choose by Name from the View menu), and scroll down to
see if you have a MacTCP Prep file already. If you do, drag that file out of the Preferences
folder and put it on your desktop. You can throw it away later, or, if you've used MacTCP
before and know you want to save its settings, hold onto it for future use.
After you've removed any existing MacTCP Prep files, hold down the Option key and
drag the MacTCP Prep file from the appropriate Internet Starter Kit Provider's folder over
to your Preferences folder. By holding down the Option key, you ensure that you make a
copi/ of the file, rather than moving the original. That original might be handy later on if
you change things and need to quickly reconfigure MacTCP to your original settings.
Now that you've moved the appropriate MacTCP Prep file over to your Preferences
folder, choose Restart from the Special menu to restart your Macintosh. When it restarts,
open MacTCP and click the More button to confirm that it has picked up the settings for
your provider from the MacTCP Prep file that you installed. If it hasn't. Option-drag
another copy into your Preferences folder, replacing the previous MacTCP Prep file, and
restart again, perhaps turning off any unnecessary extensions that might be interfering.
Note
Chapter 16 ♦ Internet Starter Kit Disk 303
Configuring MacPPP
Now you must configure MacPPP. The ISKM Installer tries to configure MacPPP for
you, but there are some pieces of information that only you know. Open the Config PPP
control panel that the ISKM Installer has installed for you in the Control Panels folder
(see figure 16.2).
Config PPP
0--O f Open ] [ Soft Close ]
DoX [ Stats... ] [ Hard Close ]
Port Nome: r^odem Port
Idle Timeout (minutes): |30
Echo Interuoi (second$): | 20
□ Terminal LOindouj
^ Hangup on Close
□ Quiet Mode
PPP Seruer; |SupraFflHModem u.321
[Config...] [ Neuj... ] [Delete...]
V2.0.1
I
Internet
Starter Kit
Disk
Figure 16.2 Config PPP control panel.
If your provider uses only SLIP, unlike the Internet Starter Kit Providers listed in appendix
A, refer to chapter 19, "SLIP,'' and chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Interfiet," for instructions on
configuring InterSLIP in conjunction with the information that your Internet provider gives
you. The hardest part of InterSLIP is making sure you have a properly written gateway
script— I've included several as examples in case you need to write your own.
If you have your modem connected to your Printer port for some reason, select that port
in the Port Name pop-up menu. If you use an Apple Express Modem or a Global Village
PowerPort Mercur}^ with either the PowerBook Duo or the PowerBook 500-series, choose
Internal Modem from the pop-up menu. For most other internal PowerBook modems,
the Modem choice is still correct. Then, from the PPP Server pop-up menu, select the
modem configuration that most closely matches yours — if none look right, select
SupraFAXModem v.32bis, which uses a generic initialization string and should work with
any Hayes-compatible modem.
Note
304 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Other users contributed these modem configurations —I can't guarantee that they work
because I don't have most of these modems to test on. You may have to use your modem
manual or call your modem vendor to decide on a different modem init string. Also, I've only
entered the most likely strings in Config PPP— there are even more in a file called Modem
Strings in the MacPPP 2.0.1 folder.
Click the Config button to bring up the Server Configuration dialog (see figure 16.3).
PPP Seruer Nome: |SuprflFnHModem u.32b|
Port Speed: |I920Q
Flouj ControIr fcTS onig ▼]
® Tone Dial OPUseDial
Phone num | ~|
Modem Init |nTOFI |
Modem connect timeout: |90 | seconds
[Connect Script...) [ LCP Options... ]
[nuthentlcatlon...)[lPCP Options...] [-B2H
Figure 16.3 MacPPP Server Configuration dialog.
First, enter your phone number. If you're calling long distance, you probably must enter
the digit 1 before the number. If you're dialing out through a large phone system in a
company or in a hotel room, you may have to prefix the number with 8, or 9,. In both
cases, the comma tells the modem to pause for two seconds before dialing.
If you don't think the modem init string that's installed for you will work with your
modem, enter the appropriate one in the Modem Init field. Check your modem manual —
don't guess! Make sure your modem init string turns hardware handshaking on and
XON/XOFF off.
If you're using a 28.8 Kbps modem and there wasn't a configuration for you in Config
PPP's pop-up menu, choose 38400 from the Port Speed pop-up menu. If you're using a
14.4 Kbps modem, choose 19200. In both cases, if everything works right, you can increase
that speed to 57600. Never select either 28800 or 14400 — some modems simply don't work
with those settings.
Time for another decision. If your provider uses PAP, or Password Authentication
Protocol, click the Authentication dialog and enter your userid and password (given to
you by your provider) in the dialog. Then click the Connect Script button and erase all the
fields and turn off the <CR> checkboxes. Although useful, PAP isn't yet supported by all
Internet providers.
Chapter 16 ^ Internet Starter Kit Disk 305
If your provider does not support PAP, you must edit the Connect Script. Click the
Connect Script button (see figure 16.4).
The template script that Tve entered here may or may not be correct. It's the most com-
mon, and it is likely to work for most providers. However, your provider may require
you to send the string PPP after you login, or something like that. Check your provider's
instructions to see if the connect script differs from the template. In all likelihood it won't,
and if it does, it won't differ significantly.
lUolt timeout:
|40 1 seconds
<CR>
® Out Oliloit
1
1 E)
QOut (§)UJeit
login:
1 □
® Out QIUqW
|Replace-this-llne-uj|th-your-userid
1 IS
OOiit (S>\Uq\{
jssuiord:
1 □
(i)0ut OU^oit
1 Replace- thls-line-iulth-your-passiiiord
1 IS)
(S)0ut OU^oit
1
1 D
(i)0ut OUJoit
1
1 □
(§>0ut OU^Bit
1
1 □
[ Cnncel ] [ OK ]
Internet
3* Starter FGt
^ Disk
Figure 16.4 MacPPP Connect Script dialog.
Enter your userid and your password in the fields marked for them, replacing all of the
template text. Make sure to enter your userid and your password in exactly the same case
as they were given to you. For the purposes of a userid or password, "Adam" and
"adam" are completely different. Click the OK button to save your changes, and back in
the Server Configuration dialog, click the Done button.
You should now be able to click the Open button in the Config PPP control panel to
establish your connection to your PPP account. If you have troubles, first review the
section in chapters 17 and 18 about setting up MacTCP and MacPPP and also read
chapter 20, "Troubleshooting Your Connection."
Configuring Eudora and Email
To configure Eudora for use with your account, you must enter your POP account and
real name (and possibly an SMTP ser\'er) in Eudora's Getting Started section in the
Settings dialog. See chapter 21, "Email," and chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet," for
detailed instructions. Your provider should have given you all of the information to enter
into Eudora.
Note
306 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Configuring Usenet News
To properly use any of the newsreaders, you must know a few pieces of information.
Most important is the name of your NNTP server, also called a news server, and tlie name
of your SMTP, or mail server. Some providers may require a userid and password, which
are usually the same as the userid and password you use in Eudora. Again, your Internet
provider gives you this information. If you use either NewsWatcher or NewsHopper, use
Internet Config (see chapter 27, ''Utilities & Miscellany") to enter this information. Other-
wise, simply refer to chapter 22, "Usenet News," and chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet."
Configuring Anarchic and FTP
To use Anarchie, you must first enter your email address (which Anarchie uses as a
password for anonymous FTP sites) in Internet Config. See chapter 27, "Utilities &
Miscellany," and chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet," for instructions on how to configure
Internet Config, and see chapter 23, "FTP," and chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet," for
additional information about Anarchie.
Configuring Other MacTCP-based Applications
MacWeb (see chapter 25, "World Wide Web") requires no configuration at all, and as
you've probably noticed by now, it's a good idea to run through all the settings in Internet
Config quickly for use with Anarchie, NewsWatcher, and NewsHopper. See chapter 27,
"Utilities & Miscellany," and chapter 29, "Step-by-Step Internet," for instructions on how
to configure Internet Config.
That's all there is to it — enjoy your Internet connection!
After you install all the software, configure MacPPP or Inter SLIP, and make the connection
to your PPP or SLIP account, you can run the great programs discussed in chapters 21
through 28. MacPPP and InterSLIP do nothing more than establish the connection.
Installation Details
Installers are good at putting files in specific places, but they seldom tell you exactly
where the various files have ended up. The following information explains where every-
thing ends up on your hard disk, organized by installation option.
Installation Option Details
This section details precisely what files each installation option installs and where those
files are installed on your disk.
Chapter 16 ♦ Internet Starter Kit Disk 307
Full MacPPP Install
■ MacTCP: MacTCP is installed in the Control Panels folder.
■ Customized MacTCP Prep Files: A Customized MacTCP Prep Files folder is in-
stalled in the ISKM3 Folder that you save on your hard disk.
■ MacPPP: Config PPP is installed in your Control Panels folder, PPP is installed in
your Extensions folder, and PPP Preferences is installed in your Preferences folder.
A MacPPP 2.0.1 folder containing documentation and modem strings is installed in
your ISKM3 Folder.
■ InterSLlP: InterSLlP is not installed.
■ Anarchie: Anarchie is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You should use Internet
Config to configure Anarchie's Preferences with your email address. ^ internet
■ Eudora: Eudora is installed in your 1SKM3 Folder. You must configure Eudora with i
your POP Account and real name before using it.
■ Internet Config: Internet Config is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You must config-
ure your email address in Internet Config before you use Anarchie.
■ MacWeb: MacWeb is installed in your ISKM3 Folder.
■ Stuffit Expander: Stuffit Expander is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You may want
to move the program to your desktop because you will probably be dropping many
files on it to debinhex and expand them.
■ Get New Internet Programs: This folder, containing the bookmarks that point at the
latest versions of the most useful Internet programs stored on ftp . tidbits . com, is
installed in your ISKM3 Folder.
Full InterSLlP Install
■ MacTCP: MacTCP is installed in the Control Panels folder.
■ Customized MacTCP Prep Files: The Customized MacTCP Prep Files folder is not
installed because the Internet Starter Kit Providers offer PPP connections.
■ MacPPP: MacPPP is not installed.
■ InterSLlP: InterSLlP Setup is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. InterSLlP Control is
installed in your System Folder only if you use System 6. The InterSLlP extension is
installed in your Extensions folder. An InterSLlP Folder is installed in your Prefer-
ences folder in the System Folder; it contains a Dialing Scripts folder with several
dialing scripts, and a Gateway Scripts folder with several example gateway scripts.
An InterSLlP 1.0.1 folder containing InterSLlP Setup, documentation, and modem
strings is installed in the ISKM3 Folder that you save on your hard disk.
■ Anarchie: Anarchie is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You should use Internet
Config to configure Anarchie's Preferences with your email address.
308 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
■ Eudora: Eudora is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You must configure Eudora with
your POP Account and real name before using it.
■ Internet Config: Internet Config is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You must config-
ure your email address in Internet Config before you use Anarchie.
■ MacWeb: MacWeb is installed in your ISKM3 Folder.
■ Stuffit Expander: Stuffit Expander is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You may want
to move the program to your desktop because you will probably be dropping many
files on it to debinhex and expand them.
■ Get New Internet Programs: This folder, containing the bookmarks that point at the
latest versions of the most useful Internet programs stored on ftp - tidbits . com, is
installed in your ISKM3 Folder.
MacTCP Only
■ MacTCP: MacTCP is installed in the Control Panels folder. If you use this option to
reinstall MacTCP after removing a corrupted version, make sure to restart after
throwing out the old MacTCP, MacTCP DNR, and MacTCP Prep. Otherwise, your
new version may retain the corruption.
MacPPP Only
■ MacPPP: Config PPP is installed in your Control Panels folder; PPP is installed in
your Extensions folder; and PPP Preferences is installed in your Preferences folder.
A MacPPP 2.0.1 folder containing documentation is installed in the ISKM3 Folder
that you save on your hard disk.
InterSLIP Only
■ InterSLIP: InterSLIP Setup is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. InterSLIP Control is
installed in your Control Panels folder only if you use System 6. The InterSLIP
extension is installed in your Extensions folder. An InterSLIP Folder is installed in
your Preferences folder; it contains a Dialing Scripts folder with several dialing
scripts and a Gateway Scripts folder with several example gateway scripts. An
InterSLIP 1.0.1 folder containing InterSLIP Setup and documentation is installed
in the ISKM3 Folder that you save on your hard disk.
Anarchie Only
■ Anarchie: Anarchie is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You should use Internet
Config to configure Anarchie's Preferences with your email address.
Chapter 16 ^ Internet Starter Kit Disk 309
Eudora Only
■ Eudora: Eudora is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. Before using it, you must custom-
ize Eudora with your POP Account and real name.
Internet Config Only
■ Internet Config: Internet Config is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You must config-
ure your email address in Internet Config before you use Anarchie.
Mac Web Only
■ MacWeb: MacWeb is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. 2.
Stuffit Expander Only
■ Stuffit Expander: Stuffit Expander is installed in your ISKM3 Folder. You may want
to move the program to your desktop for easy access.
Bookmarks for New Internet Programs Only
■ Get New Internet Programs: This folder, containing the bookmarks that point at the
latest versions of the most useful Internet programs stored on ftp . tidbits . com, is
installed in your ISKM3 Folder.
Customized MacTCP Prep Files Only
■ Customized MacTCP Prep Files: A Customized MacTCP Prep Files folder is in-
stalled in your ISKM3 Folder.
Moving on to MacTCP
Internet
Starter Kit
Disk
Now that you've installed the software from the ISKM disk, the time has come to learn
how it works, assuming you haven't already jumped ahead and read about MacTCP and
MacPPP in the following chapters.
MacTCP
"The time has come/' the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of news — and chips — and Gopher hacks,
Of Babbage's — and pings."
Apologies to Lewis Carroll, but the time has come to talk of many things, all of them
dependent on Apple's MacTCP. I'm going to start by discussing MacTCP itself, which
Hayden licensed from Apple to put on the disk that comes with this book. I also take a
quick look at Open Transport, MacTCP's successor, which is currently in testing and may
be out before the next edition of this book. With those preliminaries out of the way, let's
check out MacTCP 2.0.6.
MacTCP
Roughly speaking, MacTCP is a translator. It enables the Macintosh to speak the language
of the Internet, TCP/IP {Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Normally, of
course, Macs speak AppleTalk to one another, over Macintosh networks. You must have
the MacTCP control panel installed and configured properly, in order for the MacTCP-
based programs such as Fetch and Netscape to work, although MacTCP does not make
the connection itself. Think of MacTCP as the Babel Fish from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy. Pop it in your Mac's ear (the Control Panel folder, actually), and your Mac under-
stands the Internet noise that flows in and out. The metaphor of speaking and languages
isn't quite accurate because TCP/IP is actually a transport protocol. But the idea of
MacTCP as a Babel Fish that translates Internet gibberish into a language the Mac can
Note Note
312 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
understand seems to be the most understandable metaphor. Luckily, everything that
MacTCP does happens at such a low level that you never notice. In fact, after you set up
MacTCP correctly, you should never notice that it's present.
After your Mac is connected to tlie Internet with MacTCP and a network, SLIP, PPP, or
Apple Remote Access (ARA), it is essentially the same as any other Internet machine and
has its own IP number. This means that you can connect to other Internet machines
directly, without going through an intermediate machine. You can also, if you want, run
server software to turn your Mac into an FTP, Gopher, or Web server, although that really
requires a permanent Internet connection.
Because the Internet is based on the TCP/IP protocols, the only way for a Mac to enjoy a full
Internet connection is to use MacTCP. If you do not have MacTCP installed and a MacTCP-
based connection using PPP, SLIP, ARA, or a Internet-connected network, you cannot use
the MacTCP-based programs. Period.
Apple and other companies have thought in the past that MacTCP is a program that only
large organizations want to buy, install, and configure. Accordingly, most of the docu-
mentation I've seen makes this assumption, too. It's a poor assumption these days,
because individuals using PPP or SLIP can easily gain access to the Internet, and PPP and
SLIP require MacTCP. However, if you work at a university or business that provides
your Internet connection, it's a good bet that you have a network administrator who
knows a great deal about MacTCP, and who has probably preconfigured it for your
convenience.
Evidence that this view of MacTCP is changing comes from Apple's inclusion of MacTCP in
System 7.5. If you have System 7.5, even if you've never tried to connect to the Internet, you
very well may have MacTCP already installed (but not configured).
In fact, a system administrator can preconfigure and then lock MacTCP (using another
control panel called AdminTCP) so you can't change any of this information. I'm assum-
ing that you want to use the version of MacTCP that I include on the disk, though, and
that version enables anyone to configure it.
Because those of you with network administrators can ask them for help, I concentrate on
details of interest to the individual who has no local network administrator and must rely
solely on this book and the system administrator at a public provider.
Chapter 17 ^ MacTCP 313
Along with the help text that's built into my installer for you to save or print (and 1
strongly recommend you do this), you may want to browse through a document about
MacTCP written by Eric Behr. It's available at:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/ticlbits/tisk/info/mactcp-info-13.hqx
If You Use an Internet Starter Kit Provider
This chapter may seem a bit long, and if you've skimmed through it already, involved. It
is; 1 won't pretend otherwise. However, there's a reason for that.
There are three types of people who are reading this chapter. The first type just wants to
get on the Internet quickly and plans to use one of the Internet access providers listed in
appendix A, "Internet Starter Kit Providers." If you fall into this group, you should not
need to configure much, if anything, in MacTCP. The ISKM Installer provides precon-
figured MacTCP Prep files, which contain the settings you need. The ISKM Installer
installs a folder called "Customized MacTCP Prep Files," which contains a number of
other folders named for the various Internet Starter Kit providers. To configure MacTCP,
just hold down the Option key (this makes a copy of the file rather than just moving it)
and drag the appropriate MacTCP Prep file for your provider into your Preferences
Folder in the System Folder, and then restart. Bear in mind that if you have previously
configured MacTCP, the new MacTCP Prep file will replace the old one.
The second type of reader cannot work with one of the Internet Starter Kit providers for
some reason, usually related to none of them being a local call. If you fall into this cat-
egory, unless the provider you sign up with locally has excellent instructions, you may
have to configure MacTCP from scratch. This chapter provides all the background infor-
mation to help you do this — you must still get the specific details from your provider.
Third and finally, some readers simply want to know more about how MacTCP works, or
perhaps they may need to know about it to better troubleshoot some problem. I've tried to
explain all the quirks that you're likely to hit in MacTCP, and in conjunction with cliapter
20, "Troubleshooting Your Connection," feel that I've provided a lot of useful information
that should help you if you have troubles.
So, if you work with one of the Internet Starter Kit providers, you can pretty much ignore
this chapter, assuming everything works properly. Otherwise, read on!
MacTCP Questions
Now, let's go over the questions that you need to ask, and get your Internet access pro-
vider to answer, before you can configure MacTCP on your own. First, of course, comes
the connection method — via PPP or SLIP, or network. If you connect via PPP or SLIP,
there are a number of other questions you must ask. Before you call your provider, read
the next few chapters on PPP and SLIP (depending on which you must use, of course) to
Part IV
Note
314 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
find out how to configure MacTCP. If you're connecting via a network, most of the same
rules apply, but again, your network administrator knows the details. And, frankly,
although you're somewhat more likely to use a Manually-addressed account when
connecting via a network, things are usually easier without the added PPP or SLIP layer.
Second, find out whether you are supposed to determine your address Manually, whether
it's assigned dynamically when you call the Sewer each time, or Dynawically at random
(which is apparently seldom used, dangerous, and worth avoiding). Keep reading, but
those three italicized terms are extremely important and confusing because each corre-
sponds to a choice in the MacTCP control panel; the way people talk about the methods
doesn't always correspond.
Again, if you use one of the Internet Starter Kit Providers listed in appendix A, you do not
need to collect ariy of this information!
In talking with system administrators, I find that most call Manually-addressed accounts
static (because your IP address is assigned once and never changes) and Server-addressed
accounts dynamic (because the server assigns you a different IP address on the fly each
time you connect). You see the problem. I've never heard of anyone using a Dynamically-
addressed account outside of a controlled laboratory situation, complete with rats, mazes,
and spilled ink. (Okay, so I exaggerate slightly. But only slightly.)
If you have a Manually-addressed account, you must find out what your IP address
number will be. It will be four numbers, separated by periods, and should look something
like 1 92 . 1 35 . 1 91 . 1 28 . If you connect manually, you also need a gateway address num-
ber in the same format. You may need this gateway address with a server-addressed
account as well, but MacTCP doesn't allow you to enter it — some implementations of
SLIP do. Depending on the configuration of your site, you may also need to find out your
network class and subnet mask, and your network administrator should know what to
tell you here. People who use PPP and SLIP do not, for the most part, ever need to config-
ure the network class and subnet mask part of MacTCP.
No matter what, you need to know the numeric IP addresses of one or more domain
name servers, which are machines that translate between names that you enter, such as
nwnexus . wa - com, and the numeric addresses that the machines all use, such as
192 . 135 . 191 . 1 . Finally, although you don't need them to configure MacTCP, now is a
good time to ask your system administrator for the addresses of your SMTP (Simple Mail
Transport Protocol) and NNTP (Net News Transport Protocol) servers. Also ask your
system administrator what your POP account will be, and whether it's different from
your email address. See Table 17.1 for examples of each of these data.
Note
Chapter 17 ^ MacTCP 315
Table 17.1
MacTCP Account Information
Item
Example
Connection method
SLIP, LocalTalk, Ethernet
Addressing style
Manually, Server, Dynamically
IP address (if Manually)
e.g., 192.135.191.128
Gateway address (if necessary)
e.g., 192.135.191 .253
Network class (if Manually and necessary)
A, B, or C
Subnet Mask (if Manually and necessary)
Ask
Primary and Secondary Domain Name Servers
e.g., 198.137.231.1
Local domain
e.g., halcyon.com
SMTP mail server
e.g., mail.halcyon.com
NNTP news server
e.g., news . halcyon . com
POP account
e.g., tidbits@mail.halcyon.com
Email address
e.g., tidbits@halcyon.com
Every now and then I get complaints from people who say that they don't have a system
administrator to ask. I hate to tell them, but unless they are in complete charge of the
machine that they connect to, there must be someone else who acts as the system administra-
tor. You cannot set this stuff up entirely on your own— you must have the cooperation of
the person who runs the machine to ivhich you connect. This person usually works for the
organization that provides your Internet access, such as a university information technology
department or a company like Northwest Nexits, the Internet access provider I use.
I realize this information is a bit much to swallow at once, but that's why I go over how
to configure MacTCP in the following section, so that you can see where each piece of
information goes. Also, check out the worksheet at the back of the book — you can fill it in
with your information to make it easier to set up MacTCP, and, if you use either, PPP or
SLIP.
Installation and Setup
To start, copy the MacTCP control panel to the Control Panels folder in your System
Folder. If you drag it to the System Folder icon. System 7 (or later, of course) copies it
to the right place.
Part IV
Note Note Note
316 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If you are upgrading from a previous version ofMacTCP, write doxvn all of your settings.
Then, make sure to delete the old MacTCP control panel, the MacTCP DNR file that lives
loose in the System Folder, and the MacTCP Prep file that lives in your Preferences folder. If
you fail to delete these items before you install the nezv version, there's no telling xvhat could
go wrong.
A Brief Break: Installing SLIP or PPP
If you plan to connect via PPP or SLIP, take a moment and install MacPPP or InterSLIP,
because you cannot finish configuring MacTCP without MacPPP or InterSLIP installed.
I'm going to crib a few paragraphs from the MacPPP and InterSLIP installation sections,
so don't be surprised if this information sounds familiar later.
Again, the ISKM Installer places the various pmrts of MacPPP and InterSLIP in the proper
folders automatically. If you get a new version of either, though, you may need these instruc-
tions to knoiv where the different files live. Note also that all the Internet Starter Kit Provid-
ers use PPP, not SLIP.
Installing MacPPP requires placing a control panel called Config PPP in your Control
Panels folder, and an extension called PPP in your Extensions folder. If you drop them
on your closed System Folder, System 7 automatically places them in the proper folders.
After you've installed Config PPP and PPP, restart your Mac.
Installing InterSLIP requires placing an extension called InterSLIP in your Extensions
folder. If you drop it on the System Folder icon. System 7 places it in the correct location.
The application called InterSLIP Setup can live anywhere on your hard disk, but it may
be a good idea to put it, or an alias to it, in your Apple Menu Items folder, for easy access.
After you place those files in the proper places, restart your Mac.
Configuring the MacTCP Main Window
If you aren't installing MacPPP or InterSLIP, simply restart now. When the Mac comes
back up, open the MacTCP control panel from the Control Panels folder (see figure 17.1).
If you've installed InterSLIP rather than MacPPP, you have an icon labeled InterSLIP
instead of PPP in the MacTCP control panel main zoindow. I have additional icons because
of my direct Internet connection.
Note
Chapter 17 ^ MacTCP 317
Figure 17,1 MacTCP control panel.
You must select one of the connection method icons (you may have more, fewer, or
different ones) in the upper part of the control panel to tell MacTCP how you plan to
connect. If you have a LocalTalk network attached to the Internet through a router, select
the LocalTalk icon. If you have an Ethernet connection, select that icon. If you use
MacPPP, select the PPP icon. And, of course, for a SLIP connection, select the InterSLIP
icon.
Do not install MacPPP and InterSLIP at the same time— they seem to confuse MacTCP if
both are available. Also, if you want to sioitch betioeen the two, completely reinstall MacTCP
before switching.
If your provider gives you a Manually-addressed account (a static address) and provides
your IP address, type the address into the IP Address field where you selected the con-
nection method. If your host machine assigns you an address (a dynamic, or Server-
addressed account), leave this field alone, because MacTCP fills it in when you actually
make a connection and are assigned an IP address by the server. Not too hard yet (I hope).
Configuring the MacTCP Configuration Dialog
Now click the More button in the MacTCP control panel to bring up the configuration
dialog box (see figure 17.2).
Remember that I said to ask whether your address was obtained Manually, from your
Server, or Dynamically? The answer is the setting for the Obtain Address set of radio
buttons. Select the button that corresponds to what your system administrator tells you.
Part IV
Note
318
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
— Obtain Address: —
0 Manually
® Seruer
O Dynamically
IP Address:
Class:| H 1 Rddross: 0.0.0. 0
Subnet Mask: 255.0.0.0
iiniiiiTiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiii'm
Net 1 Subnet I Node
Bits: B 0 2*1
Net: |o 1 nUuk
“Routing Informatlon:-
Gateufay Rddress:
Subnet: [o ) niiuk
Node: |o 1 Dtiuk
1204 57.187,1 1
Domain Name Server Information:
Domain IP Rddress Default
9.M
Figure 17.2 MacTCP configuration dialog.
Time for a brief talk about those Obtain Address buttons. Everything I have read or been
told has advised avoiding the Dynamically button like the plague. The problem has to do
with the fact that when you use it, MacTCP makes up an address at random and then
looks for duplicate addresses. Apparently, this process tends to fail and can result in
duplicate IP addresses on the network at the same time, which is a bad thing. The situa-
tion is actually somewhat more complex, but suffice it to say that you should never select
the Dynamically button unless your network administrator explicitly tells you to and
provides a range of addresses from which MacTCP can choose. Tve never heard of any
Internet access providers using the Dynamically button with SLIP or PPP accounts.
If you click the Manually button, you must enter, in the outer control panel window, the
permanent IP address that your system administrator has provided for you. Either use the
Manually button or the Server button, and remember that if your system administrator
talks about dynamic addressing, he probably means what MacTCP calls a Server-ad-
dressed account.
Enough about the Obtain Address buttons. If your system administrator gives you a
gateway address, type it into the Routing Information Gateway Address field. If you use
a Server-addressed account, you can't type in the Gateway Address field, so don't worry
about trying to. Again, MacTCP fills it in when you connect.
If you use MacTCP with MacPPP or InterSLlP, there's no way to affect this field, but with
VersaTerm SLIP, you can set the Gateioay Address, even if you use a Server-addressed
account
The large IP Address area in the upper right certainly looks hairy, but for most people,
there's no need to touch anything in this area. That's the good news.
Note Note
Chapter 17 ^ MacTCP 319
The bad news is that if you do have to mess with this section of the dialog, you need help
from your administrator. You may have to set the correct netw^ork class (the pop-up menu
containing A, B, or C) and the subnet mask (the slider bar beneath the title in the dialog
box) manually. Primarily, large nehvorked sites must deal with subnet masks because
they sometimes use a method called subnetting to handle their IP netw^orks. If you have
subnetting at your site, you also have someone who knows something about it and can
provide details of how to configure MacTCP for your site. Be sure to ask nicely!
Domain Name Servers
You must fill in the Domain Name Server Information section with the name of your
domain and the IP numbers of your name servers.
The domain name servei' is used every time you use a progra?n to connect to an Internet site
by name. So, if you use Anarchie to connect to ftp. tidbits, com, the domain name sender
looks up ftp.tidbits.com and sees that its IP number is 192. 135. 191 . 2 . Since the
computers always use IP numbers and people usually use domain names, the domain name
server is an essential part of the MacTCP-based connection.
As you can see previously in figure 17.2, 1 have access to a number of name servers.
Unfortunately, the interface for this section of MacTCP is quite confusing. Let me try to
explain it as best I can.
Warning: This stuff gets pretty technical, so if you're not interested and every thing zvorks
properly after you install MacTCP, just skip it. I use the halcyon.com domam as an
example here, but if you don't use Northwest Nexus, you undoubtedly will have a different
domain, and you will also of course have different IP numbers for your domain name servers.
For each entry in the MacTCP Domain Name Server Information area, there are two fields
and a Default radio button. The left-hand field holds a domain name (not the name of a
domain name server!). The right-hand field holds the IP numbers of domain name server
that MacTCP uses to look up addresses in the domain listed in the left-hand field. Only
one of the radio buttons can be selected at a time, and MacTCP uses the line containing
the selected Default radio button as your default domain name server. So, when I put
halcyon . com . in the first left-hand field, Tm telling MacTCP to use the name server at
190.137.231.1 for all requests within the halcyon . com domain. In other words, the
domain name server at 1 98 . 1 37 . 231 . 1 is used only if the name that you're looking up
ends in halcyon . com
Part IV
Note Note
320 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The domain name you enter in that first left-hand field is also the domain name that
MacTCP tacks on the end if you use a single word name, such as coho. The utility of this
is that I could say, "telnet to the machine coho . halcyon . com" by merely entering coho in
NCSA Telnet's connection dialog. This isn't particularly helpful in normal usage.
This process of using only the first name of an Internet machine, say, coho, also is called
using unqualified domain names. A full name like coho , halcyon , com, in contrast, is
called a fully qualified domain name.
Make sure to select the Default button next to this first entry. This button has two tasks.
First, it identifies the domain that MacTCP uses to complete unqualified domain names,
as mentioned above. Second, it ensures that the domain name server in that line,
1 98 . 1 37 . 231 . 1, is used if, and only if, no other lines in the domain name server configu-
ration match the request. Reflect on this briefly while I get to the next few lines, since they
interact with one another.
You may have noticed the period after the halcyon, com domain in the smen shot. That
period positively denotes an absolute domain, as opposed to one that's relative to the current
domain. Hoioever, MacTCP currently treats all names that contain at least one period as
absolute names, so it makes no difference at all nozv. It does on other systems, and it may
with MacTCP in the future; hence, it's a good idea to get in the habit of appending that last
period.
Next, look at the second set of fields. In the left-hand field I have a period, and in the
right-hand field, I have exactly the same IP number as the first right-hand field. This
second line is necessary because the first line (the primary name server) won't be used for
requests outside of the domain listed in the first line. By duplicating the IP number, we
tell MacTCP to use this name server for all requests outside the halcyon . com domain.
Keep all this in mind while we look at the third line.
The third set of fields have another period in the left-hand field and a different IP number,
1 92 - 1 35 . 1 91 . 1, in the right-hand field. This denotes my secondary name server, the
name server that MacTCP queries if it doesn't get anything back from the first one.
Okay, now we have all the pieces to make sense of this confusing configuration interface.
If a program asks for the IP number for a machine in tlie halcyon . com domain, MacTCP
asks the machine in the first line (the primary name server) to handle the request. If
MacTCP asks for the IP number for a machine anywhere outside of the halcyon . com
domain, the second line handles the request. Finally, if the main name server is down.
Note Note
Chapter 17 ^ MacTCP 321
rendering the first two lines ineffective, the secondary^ name server in the third line kicks
in to look up the IP number in question. Although the second line may seem redundant,
it's not. If you didn't have it and asked for the IP number of a machine outside of the
halcyon . com domain, that request would go directly to the secondary name server. If that
name ser\^er were down, your request would fail.
You can't see it in the screen shot, but I actually have a fourth line with yet another period in
the left-hajid field and a different IP number in the right-hand field. It handles requests if the
first two name servers are dozon. You can have three or more name servers, but that many
generally aren't necessary.
I did run into an interesting problem when helping a friend with MacTCP. He could
connect to FTP and Web sites on the Internet just fine, but he couldn't get his mail, and
when we checked, he couldn't connect to his provider's Web server either. It turned out
that he had only tw^o entries in his MacTCP Domain Name Server Information section,
and both were wrong in such a way that lookups outside of his domain worked fine, but
every time a program tried to look up a host within his domain (such as his SMTP server
or Web server), it failed. So pay close attention when configuring your domain name
servers — it can cause some quirky problems if configured incorrectly.
The most recent version of MacTCP, version 2,0,6, introduced a situation where it will fail
to resolve domain names that contain the underscore character. This is actually the correct
behavior because the underscore shouldn't be used in a domain name, but a few sites did use
it. Luckily, after MacTCP 2,0,6 was released, most of those sites renamed the offending
machines.
After you're done with all that domain name server information, click the OK button to
save your changes, and then close the MacTCP control panel. Depending on what you
change and if you've used MacTCP yet that session, MacTCP may tell you that the
changes won't take effect until you restart. Go ahead and restart your Mac if necessary. If
I'm troubleshooting, I usually restart every time I reconfigure MacTCP whether it tells me
to or not, just to be safe.
MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep
After you configure MacTCP and restart your Mac, it creates two files. One, called
MacTCP DNR, is loose in your System Folder, and the other, called MacTCP Prep by
default, is in your Preferences folder. MacTCP creates both files from scratch if you delete
Part IV
Note Note
322 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
them and doesn't lose any settings in the process, because it stores settings both in its
control panels and in the MacTCP Prep file. Deleting these files is a must when you're
troubleshooting or upgrading to a new version of MacTCP.
MacTCP DNR stands for Domain Name Resolver. If you want to know more, turn on
Balloon Help and point to that file with the arrow. Suffice it to say that throwing out the
MacTCP DNR file and restarting can solve some weird MacTCP problems.
The MacTCP Prep file bears some additional discussion. As I said previously, when you
configure MacTCP, it stores its settings in both the MacTCP control panel and in the
MacTCP Prep file. Although this may seem unnecessary, it has a useful side effect.
Since MacTCP reads its settings preferentially from the MacTCP Prep file, you can keep
multiple MacTCP Prep files handy for working with different providers. Most people
won't need this capability of course, but for those that do, it comes in handy. For instance,
when I'm traveling, I use different dialup accounts in different cities. I could use a utility
such as MacTCP Switcher or MacTCP Netswitch, but because I don't travel all that
frequently, I usually just pull out my old MacTCP Prep file and replace it in the Prefer-
ences folder with one customized for the new Internet access provider.
It appears that you also can rename the MacTCP Prep file, which makes it easier to keep
several different copies around. However, if you keep them in your Preferences folder,
MacTCP preferentially uses the one called MacTCP Prep over any version with a modi-
fied name.
The Hosts File
Domain name ser\'ersMacTCP didn't always exist, and before they did, each computer
had a Hosts file that contained the IP names and numbers of all the Internet machines you
could contact. When a program needed to translate an IP name into an IP number, it
looked in the Hosts file for that information (and it failed unless the machine you wanted
to connect to was listed). This worked fine when there were only several hundred ma-
chines connected to the Internet. In these days with millions of machines connected to the
Internet, the Hosts file isn't as good a solution as the domain name server, but because
there are still instances where people can't contact a domain name server, the Hosts file
has remained with us.
Theoretically, you can use any Internet machine that is a domain name server as your
domain name server, although if it's not local, the domain name server lookups may be quite
slow.
Note Note
Chapter 17 ^MacTCP 323
If you don't have a domain name server (but most people do), you must use a Hosts file,
which lives loose in the System Folder on the Mac. If you do have a domain name server
and configure the Domain Name Server Information in MacTCP appropriately, you don't
need the Hosts file at all because your Mac can ask the domain name servers for addresses
rather than look them up in the Hosts file. Using the Hosts file can be dangerous if you
don't need it, in fact, because it stores hard-coded information about which machines use
which IP numbers, and if that information changes, the Hosts file will provide incorrect
information to MacTCP. I've been bitten by this in the past, and don't recommend you
install a Hosts file unless you know you need to.
One instance when you can't access a domain name server is if you're behind a firewall,
which is a security system in zvhich everyone must go through a secure host machine that is
the only one in an organization connected to the Internet,
If you want to use the Hosts file, you must manually enter all the hosts to which you may
want to connect, along with their IP numbers. You can edit the Hosts file with TeachText
or SimpleText, but make sure to create the host entries in exactly the same manner as
shown in the examples. In any event, here's what a standard host entry looks like:
consultant.micro.umn.edu. A 134.84.132.4 ;
The Communications Toolbox Telnet tools like to use the Hosts file as a repository for
Internet machines that you have connected to previously. In fact, the VersaTerm Telnet tool
adds sites to the Hosts file for you, if you enter them into the tool's configuration dialog.
MacTCP Utilities
A few utility programs have appeared that help you troubleshoot your Internet connec-
tion. In addition, a couple of utilities, MacTCP Switcher and MacTCP Netswitch, help ease
the process of switching between two completely different MacTCP setups, such as you
might have if you use Ethernet at work and PPP at home. Unless mentioned otherwise,
the latest versions of these utilities can be found in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Part IV
324 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MacPing
Along with shareware software, Dartmouth College
has some commercial quality applications that they
sell. Included In this category are the $99 MacPing
3.0 and the $399 MacPing 3.0 Pro, ping utilities that
work with both AppleTalk and TCP/IP networks such
as the Internet. MacPing 3.0 is limited to testing five
AppleTalk zones, whereas MacPing 3.0 Pro can test
an unlimited number of AppleTalk zones. They're
othen/vise identical. Not being a network administra-
tor, I’m not really sure what MacPing tells me, but 1
gather that by watching the way the pings come back
from all the machines, you can tell where there might
be a network problems. Check out its help text for
more information about what all the parts of the
window do. For ordering information contact True
BASIC, Inc., the MacPing distributors, at 800/436-
2111 and check out the demo at the FTP URL below.
Prob* Tiip«; i Ihon ICMP Icho
2ont:| tiding IP-. ▼)
raOl Ntluioik:i TetllP-
bimi T,k
« '
^
f', t*lrv o 'JtkfOmr
itt 'P.nt j
IX
00
190
5
• W.tl7illJ
100
n
1 pmmM 10 in
Ntai IW H«a: IN TtaMM; 279 mm
t
f tp: / /ftp . dartmouth . edu/pub/mac/
MacTCP Watcher
MacTCP Watcher is a free program written by
the prolific Peter Lewis to display the internals
of MacTCP's workings. You must be an expert to
decipher most of this information, and Peter claims
that even he doesn't know what most of it means.
However, if you're having troubles with MacTCP,
MacTCP Watcher proves to be one of the best tools
available for troubleshooting a bad connection. I still
don’t understand what it complains about, but it tends
to react In specific ways to specific problems, and
those reactions are usually more useful than the
generic error messages that come back from other
programs. MacTCP’s other functions include a ping
test, which is a bit like sonar over a network. It’s
useful for determining whether a remote machine is
up, and if so, about how far away It is (or how slow
the network to it is). The UDP and TCP tests mean
less to me, but I use MacTCP Watcher’s DNS button
to match IP names and numbers. So, definitely pick
up MacTCP Watcher, and poke at the buttons to see if
anything that comes back looks useful. I always have
a smashing good time looking at stuff I don't
understand.
Chapter 27 ♦ MacTCP 325
MacTCP Netswitch
The free MacTCP Netswitch control panel, written
by David Walton, of the University of Notre Dame,
appears to be the more sophisticated of the two
utilities for switching between MacTCP connections.
It works by sensing at startup whether you're
connected to an AppleTalk network, and if so, what
zone you’re in. After it’s sensed whether you’re in a
network or not, it swaps in an appropriate MacTCP
Prep file from a group of preconfigured ones. The
major advantage of the way MacTCP Netswitch
senses the environment at startup is that theoreti-
cally you don’t have to restart, because It has forced
MacTCP to load the proper MacTCP Prep file at
startup.
http; //WWW. nd.edu/-dwalton1 /netswitch. html
MacTCP Switcher
John Norstad’s free MacTCP Switcher requires a
bit more interaction from the user than MacTCP
Netswitch. After you have MacTCP set up properly,
you run MacTCP Switcher and save a configuration
file that records the current MacTCP settings. Do the
same for your other configurations. To restore a
saved configuration, double-click It in the Rnder, and
when MacTCP Switcher prompts you, click the Set
MacTCP button to set MacTCP to use the saved
configuration. Another alert then appears telling you
that MacTCP has been set; it may also tell you to
restart your Mac, and if so provides a Restart button
to do so instantly. MacTCP Switcher doesn’t work
with whole MacTCP Prep files, as MacTCP Netswitch
does, but Instead copies the relevant resources from
the MacTCP Prep file to the configuration file and
back again. It never touches the MacTCP control
panel itself.
0
Set MacTCP to the configuration soued on file
“On the road"?
If you hauen’t already done lo, you should saue
your current MacTCP configuration to a file so you
can restore It later. To do this, click tho “Saue"
button.
[ Saue ] ( Cancel ) f^^^^TC^
Query it!
Chris McNeil, has a free, easy to use, and potentially
useful program called Query it! that enables you to
query your local nameserver to find out more
information about various Internet hosts. The most
useful piece of information you can get from Query it!
is the IP address for a host, the number that goes with
the name. For instance. I asked Query it! to tell me the
address of halcyon. com.That’s all there Is to Query
it!, although you can see if the CNAME, HINFO Record,
or MX Record results are of interest to you.
Part IV
326 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Open Transport
Apple hasn't yet released Open Transport, the successor to MacTCP, but I was able to
take a look at a pre-released version for this chapter. The good news is that although
MacTCP isn't that hard to configure once you understand what's going on, Open Trans-
port is much easier to configure than MacTCP. To compare Open Transport and MacTCP
is a bit misleading though, because Open Transport is a complete rewrite of the entire
communications infrastructure on the Macintosh.
Open Transport's primary goal is to support multiple networking protocols (including
AppleTalk, TCP/IP, and other mishmash acronyms like SNA, DECnet, OSI, and X.25) in
such a way as to insulate the user from the details and to simultaneously provide a single
coherent target for developers.
Most of the changes in Open Transport take place below the surface, so it's a little hard to
say too much about it until Apple releases it, perhaps in the summer of 1995. However,
based on statements that Apple has made about Open Transport in a public white paper,
I can tell you the following about Open Transport.
■ Not only will Open Transport provide a facility for multiple configurations, switch-
ing between them will no longer require restarting, something that has haunted
PowerBook users connecting with MacTCP.
■ Open Transport will enable Macintosh users to participate in the MBone, which
provides the capability to broadcast (or multicast, the current term) streams of audio
or video data to multiple machines without sending each a separate copy (a high-
speed connection will still be required for this to work acceptably).
■ Open Transport will support a new Internet standard, the Dynamic Host Config-
uration Protocol (DHCP), which will make it even easier to set up and configure a
Macintosh to work on the Internet, since a DHCP server will provide most of the
information automatically.
■ Open Transport will continue to support two older automatic configuration meth-
ods, Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP) and Boot Protocol (BootP).
■ Open Transport will include full Balloon Help and, for System 7.5 users, full
AppleGuide support. The combination of these help systems will significantly
improve ease of use.
■ Open Transport will be Power Mac-native, and when combined with Open
Transport-aware, Power Mac-native applications on a Power Mac, will provide
significantly increased performance.
■ Open Transport will run on existing Macs, and although older applications won't
take advantage of Open Transport's speed increases, they should work as well as
under MacTCP. Older applications will still benefit from Open Transport's easier
interface.
Chapter 17 ^ MacTCP 327
All of that said, for most users. Open Transport's most obvious improvement on MacTCP
will be the new, simplified interface (see figure 17.3).
Connect vj®: | Ethernet ▼ |
p Setup
Configure: | Manual] g ▼ |
IP Addreoo:
Domain name:
Subnet meek:
Router address:
Name server addr.:
Figure 173 Open Transport TCP/IP Configure Manually settings.
As you can see in figure 17.3, the new interface provides two pop-up menus, one that
specifies how you want to connect to the Internet and another that specifies how your
configuration information will be entered. In figure 17.3, 1 chose to connect via Ethernet
and to configure everything manually, which meant that I had to fill in my IP Address,
Domain name. Router address, and Name server address.
Although you use the same information in configuring MacTCP, the new interface is
obviously quite a bit easier to understand. However, if you can use the new DHCP
method of automatically configuring Open Transport, you can see in figure 17.4 that
your work almost disappears.
1 TCP/IP
Connect via: I Ethernet
. Setup -
Configure: | Using "DHCP*
IP Addreaa:
Domain name:
Subnet maak;
Router addr eaa
Name server addr.:
<returned by acrver>
<returned by aerver>
<returned by server>
<returned by aerver>
<returned by aerver>
Figure 17 A Open Transport TCP/IP Configure Using "DHCP" settings.
Part IV
Note
328 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
Configuration using BootP is similarly easy, and if you connect via an AppleTalk network
at a large organization, a MacIP server can again provide all the configuration information
automatically (see figure 17.5).
. Setup -
j TCP/IP
Connect via: | AppleTalk (MacIP) ’^ |
Configure:
1 Ualng MacIP Server
MacIP eerver zone:
<current AppleTalk zone >
( Select Zone... )
IP Addrew;
<returned by aerver>
Domain name:
Suonet mask:
<returned by aerver>
Router eddreas:
<returned by 8erver>
Name acrver addr.:
<returned by a«rver>
Figure 17.5 Open Transport TCP/IP Configure Using MacIP Server settings.
Apple reportedly plans Open Transport to be a free upgrade for existing MacTCP owners,
including readers of this book. Open Transport will also undoubtedly be bundled with future
versions of the Mac OS and all neio Macs once Apple releases it, so it shouldn't be too hard
to get to that point.
Mission Accomplished
Phew! That's about it for configuring MacTCP. In most cases, MacTCP is really quite easy
to configure once you know what information goes into which fields in the Configuration
dialog. I provided all of the information above, even though most people should never
need it, because if you do need to figure out what's going on in MacTCP, you need the
details. If you use one of the providers listed in appendix A, "Internet Starter Kit Provid-
ers," and MacPPP, the ISKM Installer configures MacTCP for you. Speaking of MacPPP,
let's talk about PPP next.
Note
Chapter
PPP
An ever-increasing number of people who don't work at a large business or university
want access to the Internet, and an equally ever-increasing number of Internet access
providers are springing up to meet that need. Because individuals seldom have the level
of connectivity enjoyed by those in business or education, they must make do with slower
connections. Until recently, they've had to cope with clumsy Unix shell accounts as well.
That clumsiness is avoidable now that SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) and PPP (Point-
to-Point Protocol) accounts have become widely available; more importantly, they pro-
vide access to some extremely cool software that I talk about in future chapters.
PPP provides an Internet connection for people who connect via modem. If you have a
network, either Ethernet or LocalTalk, connected to the Internet, you don't need PPP. I
talk about SLIP in more detail in chapter 19, "SLIP," so in this chapter I concentrate on
PPP, mentioning SLIP only when the situation in question equally applies to SLIP.
Although PPP is generally used with normal ])hone lines and modems, if your provider and
telephone company both offer ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Nehuork) service, you can
use PPP with ISDN and a terminal adapter like the Motorola BitSLlRFR in place of a
modem to create a high-speed Internet connection, often for not much more than a normal
phone line would cost, if you're lucky.
Note
330 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The easiest way to understand PPP is to pretend that you don't have water service inside
your house. Every time you want to take a shower, you must run a garden hose to the
water hookup outside, take your shower, and then reel the hose back in. That's exactly
what PPP does — it establishes a temporary, low-speed connection to the Internet. You
must create that connection before you can run programs such as Anarchie and
TurboGopher.
^ Although most implementations of PPP allow you to launch a MacTCP-based program
o without connecting first (the PPP software sees xvhat's up and then establishes the connec-
tion), Vve found that auto<onnect features can be flaky. If you can use one, great, but if it
doesn't work reliably, connect manually first.
What's the difference between PPP and SLIP, and should you care? The answer to the first
part of the question seems to be that PPP is SLIP done right. Apparently, SLIP was
literally designed on the back of an envelope and implemented in an afternoon. PPP, in
contrast, was designed more carefully and is far more flexible, so that in theory it sup-
ports multiple protocols (such as AppleTalk and TCP/IP) at the same time and over the
same connection. The capability to support multiple protocols is neat because you can use
MacTCP programs at the same time as you are dialed into an AppleTalk server, much as
you can do with Apple Remote Access now, but the reality is that not all of the Macintosh
PPP implementations (like MacPPP) support anything besides TCP/IP.
PPP and SLIP accounts are not identical. You cannot use a SLIP account with MacPPP, or
a PPP account zuith InterSLIP.
Note
Chapter 18 ♦ PPP 331
As to whether or not you should care, my impression is that at the moment it doesn't
make much difference. PPP may become the standard because Apple is working on
supporting it more fully. Also, PPP has proven to be somewhat more reliable than SLIP in
the past, although that may be related to the specific implementations of PPP and SLIP. In
general, I believe that PPP is the way to go, if you can. That's why the ISKM Installer
installs MacPPP by default, but also allows you to install InterSLIP should you only be
able to get a SLIP account. Of course, if you simply cannot get a PPP account to work,
there's nothing wrong with trying a SLIP account instead.
Now, does that mean that you should run out and switch an existing SLIP account over to
PPP? No, if everything you want to do with your account works as you expect, definitely
not. PPP and SLIP are functionally identical in that all, or almost all, of the MacTCP-based
programs should work the same way with either SLIP or PPP accounts. I haven't seen
significant performance differences between the tw^o, although PPP occasionally feels a
little more responsive in interactive use (as opposed to raw download speed when you're
retrieving a file via FTP and nothing else). In addition. I've seen situations in which
InterSLIP didn't work worth beans, but MacPPP worked instantly, and also situations in
which InterSLIP was working perfectly but MacPPP never quite worked.
Hayden has licensed MacPPP and included it on the disk for your convenience. It was
written by Larrj' Blunk of Merit Network, Inc., one of the companies that helped run the
NSFNET. Commercial competition for MacPPP comes from InterPPP, a beefed-up version
of PPP, marketed by InterCon. InterPPP's main claim to fame is that it supports
AppleTalk over PPP, whicli is not true of MacPPP. There are several other less common
implementations of PPP from Tribe and Pacer Software, but they reportedly use the same
code as the version InterCon licensed and calls InterPPP.
Although it's not yet available as I write this, Hyde Park Soflume is adding PPP support to
MacSLIP (see chapter 19, "SLIP") so it will become a contender in the near future as well.
The only change in MacSLIP's standard interface is a PPP Transport button and options to
use PAP or CHAP, two authentication protocols for PPP.
I concentrate on MacPPP because the other PPP implementations, being commercial,
come with printed documentation and support. In addition, MacPPP works extremely
well for most people, and it is easy to configure, so it's the best choice for anyone starting
out. If you discover that you need the added flexibility of something like InterPPP, you
can check it out as well.
Getting an Account
When it comes time for you to get a PPP account, you should check back in chapter 11,
"Choosing a Connection," for information on how^ to pick an Internet access provider.
Part IV
Note
332 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Once you decide on a provider, you need certain information from that provider to
configure MacPPP or InterPPP. For convenience, I list the most common pieces of infor-
mation that you need in Table 18.1.
Table 18.1
PPP Information
Item
Question
Phone number
What number do I call to connect to the server?
Login name
What is my SLIP or PPP account login name? This name can
be different from your userid or machine name.
Password
What password should I provide when logging in?
Login Procedure
What should I expect to receive from your host machine
and how should my Mac respond when logging in?
You also can use the worksheet in the back of this book for recording all of this informa-
tion. Although unusual, there are other variables that you may need to set in MacPPP,
and if that's true, your Internet access provider will give you that information. The vast
majority of them work with the default settings, luckily.
MacPPP
The free MacPPP, from Larry Blunk of Merit Network, is my dialup connection method of
choice. This is partly because of its simple configuration and setup, and partly because
there are a few programs that don't work with the Server-addressed SLIP accounts on my
Internet access provider. Northwest Nexus, but that work fine with a Server-addressed
PPP account. Because it generally works so well. I've included it on the disk as the default
for those who want to work with one of the providers listed in appendix A, "Internet
Starter Kit Providers."
If you want to switch from SLIP to PPP, you must first switch your account to PPP with
your provider. When that's done, throw out MacTCP, MacTCP DNR, MacTCP Prep,
InterSLIP, and InterSLlP Control (if installed) and restart before installing MacPPP.
Note Note
Chapiter 18^ PPP 333
Installation and Setup
Installing MacPPP requires placing a control panel called Config PPP in your Control
Panels folder, and an extension called PPP in your Extensions folder. If you drag them
onto your closed System Folder, System 7 automatically places them in the proper
folders.
Once again, the ISKM Installer installs MacPPP properly for you— I include these instruc-
tions so you hww what's happened and can duplicate it with original files downloaded from
the Internet
After you've installed Config PPP and PPP, restart your Mac. Make sure that PPP is
selected in the main MacTCP window, and that you use Server-addressing. PPP has the
useful feature of being able to (at least in theory since this isn't a common setup) use
Server-addressing even if you have a permanent IP address assigned to you. Being able to
use Server-addressing with a static IP address ensures that you don't have to enter your
IP address or Gateway Address into MacTCP, generally reducing the configuration work.
It's possible to use the Manually-addressing option, but if you do that, you may have to
configure the IPCP dialog (accessible within the Config PPP configuration dialog) with your
permanent IP address in the Local column and your Gateway Address in the Remote
column. The MacPPP documentation doesn't recommend this, and I was unable to test it.
Consider yourself forewarned.
Open the Config PPP control panel. As you can see in figure 18.1, Config PPP has a
vaguely clunky interface, but it is almost effortless to configure.
101
73 Config PPP ^
[ Open ] [ Soft Close ]
OO^N [ Stats... ] [Hard Close ]
Port Namei irTodem Port ▼[
Idle Timeout (minutes): |45 ▼!
Echo Internal ($econds): |20
□ Terminal Ulindoin
□ Hangup on Close
^ Quiet Mode
PPP Serueri rhalCMon.com
[config...] [ Neuj... ] [Delete...]
v2 0 1
Figure 18.1 Config PPP control panel.
Part IV
Note Note
334 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The Port Name pop-up menu enables you to choose the Modem port or Printer port (or
any other ports registered with the Communications Toolbox); it is usually set to Modem
port.
If you use a PowerBook with an internal modem, the Port Name pop-tip menu may confuse
you. A few PowerBook modems, including the Apple Express Modem, the Global Village
PowerPort/Mercury for the PowerBook 500-series, and Duos, are bus modems, and show up
in the menu as Internal Modem. Other internal PowerBook modems are non-bus modems
and use an internal connection to the Modem port. For these, choose Modem port. Mac AV
users may also have a GeoPort option.
The Idle Timeout pop-up enables you to set a time of inactivity, from five to 120 minutes,
after which MacPPP will close the connection. If you do anything during this time, the
timer resets and MacPPP starts counting again. If your connection remains idle for the
duration specified, MacPPP closes the connection. If you have the Quiet Mode checkbox
checked, MacPPP does so without warning; if not, then at the end of the idle time period
MacPPP presents you with a dialog that enables you to either ignore the warning and
leave the PPP connection active, or close PPP.
I haven't used this feature much, because I simply connect when I want something and
disconnect when Tm done. However, I see two tremendous uses for this feature. First, for
those people who pay by the minute for their connections, having MacPPP hang up if the
line is idle could save you a fair amount of money. Second, if you want to download a
large file before you go to bed, simply set MacPPP to a relatively short timeout value and
it will hang up when it's done downloading the file. Make sure Quiet Mode is checked if
you want it to hang up without confirmation.
Some people have experienced problems with MacPPP connecting seemingly randomly.
Although most cases are caused by a program like Anarchic or TurboGopher asking for
MacTCP services, it seems that on occasion MacTCP simply decides to do something and
asks MacPPP to dial out. If you experience this, setting a short idle time in MacPPP keeps
those unwanted connections as short as possible. And of course, if you shut off your modem,
MacPPP won't be able to dial out at all.
It appears that MacPPP does a soft close in this idle timeout situation, which means that
a MacTCP-based application can automatically re-open the connection by requesting
MacTCP services. If MacPPP did a hard close, applications wouldn't be able to re-open
the connection automatically; you would have to click the Open button to open a new
connection.
Note Note Note
Chapter 18 ♦ PPP 335
I can't predict how different MacTCP-based applications will behave if their connection
disappears due to the line being idle for five or ten minutes. If you anticipate being in a
situation where MacPPP might hang up automatically after an idle timeout, make sure to
save your work in all other open applications. Some applications may even hang your Mac,
so be carefid.
The Echo Interv^al pop-up menu provides the opportunity to configure MacPPP to peri-
odically query the line to see if your connection has dropped. If MacPPP receives no
response after three successive requests, MacPPP assumes that the connection has gone
dead. I've always left Echo Interv^al turned off, although if you have trouble with your
connection dropping frequently, using it may make life easier. When MacPPP detects a
dead connection, it pops up a dialog box with three buttons for Close PPP, Ignore, or
Restart, which in this case means restarting the PPP connection, not the Macintosh. Of
course, if your connection drops, you must at least quit open MacTCP applications before
trying to do anything else. You may have to restart to clear things up appropriately if the
open applications have become sufficiently confused by the loss of the connection.
The Echo Interval feature continually setids packets to the server and waits for a response,
but these packets don't count as traffic for the Idle Timeout feature.
The Terminal Window checkbox is one of MacPPP's most useful features. If you check it,
MacPPP ignores the Phone number and Modem init fields in the Configure Server and
Connect Script dialog boxes (Til get to them in a minute). Instead, it makes you walk
through the connection manually, starting with dialing the modem with an ATDT com-
mand.
In some situations, MacPPP's terminal window doesn't echo what you type back to the
screen, but the characters will be sent when you press Return.
You may never need to use MacPPP's terminal emulator, but if you have trouble logging
on, it's much easier to have the terminal emulator built into MacPPP rather than be forced
to use an external one (see figure 18.2).
Part IV
Note
336
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 18.2 MacPPP terminal window.
If you must use the terminal window, dial the modem manually, enter your username
and password, and once you start seeing some gibberish characters that indicate the start
of PPP data, click OK to start the PPP session.
1 strongly recommend that you use MacPPP's terminal ivindow if you're having trouble
getting connected because it often reveals problems on the provider's end (like they didn't set
up a PPP account for you) and eliminates any mistakes you might have wade in the connect
script.
The two final checkboxes in the window are Hangup on Close and Quiet Mode. Hangup
on Close, if checked, sends the Hayes -f ++ escape string and then an ATH to hang up the
modem. My modem hangs up fine without this checkbox selected, but if yours doesn't,
select it. The Quiet Mode checkbox prevents certain actions from requiring confirmation,
most notably the Idle Timeout disconnect.
Once you've configured the main part of the Config PPP control panel, click the New
button to create a new configuration. Name it, and it appears in the PPP Server pop-up
menu. If you want to delete one, make sure it's showing in the menu and click the Delete
button. After creating a new configuration, click the Config button to bring up the Config-
ure Server dialog box (see figure 18.3).
Note
Chapter 18 ^PPP 337
PPP Seruer Nome: | holcyon.com |
Port Speed: 1 19200
riou) Controh lTTS only
^ToneOiol O Pulse Olol
Phone num 1 455-8455 |
Modem Inlt |HT0F9H2 |
Modem connect timeout: |90 | seconds
(Connect Script...] [ LCP Options... )
[Ruthenticotlon...] (IPCP Options...) ^
Figure 183 MacPPP Configure Server dialog.
If you want to rename your server configuration, you can edit it in the PPP Server Name
field. It makes absolutely no difference what you set the server name to — it's only for
your use. In the version of the PPP Preferences the ISKM Installer puts on your disk, I use
the PPP Server Name field to identify different modems, for instance.
After you set the PPP Server Name, you can configure the basic modem variables. Set the
Port Speed pop-up menu as high as it will work with your modem (my WorldBlazer
doesn't like speeds over 19,200 bps by default), and always try to use a Port Speed faster
than your modem, so it can take advantage of the modem's compression capabilities.
The Port Speed is the speed at which the Mac and the modem communicate, not the
speed at which the two modems communicate (unless it happens to be slower than the
fastest speed the modems have in common, at which point it forces the modems to
communicate at that speed). Do not set the Port Speed menu to 14,400 or 28,800 even if
you have a 14,400 bps or 28,800 bps modem. The reason is that some modems don't
accept those as valid port speeds, and MacPPP won't talk to the modem properly.
Port speed is reportedly irrelevant if you use a bus modem, since it doesn't use the modem
port. I'd set it to 57,600 if you have one of these modems.
Modem flow control, also sometimes called handshaking, is one of the most confusing
topics in telecommunications on the Macintosh. The basic idea is that the flow of the
incoming and outgoing packets must be organized and controlled or else you experience
the packet equivalent of traffic jams and accidents. For a modem to do handshaking in
hardware, you need a special cable (luckily, one that comes with most fast modems sold
for Macs, although every now and then someone has trouble because you can't use high
speeds on modern modems without one). All of the various options we have discussed
are forms of hardware flow control or hardware handshaking. PPP can, in theory, use
software flow control, also called XON/XOFF, which doesn't require a special cable, but
I've never seen anyone try. Usually, there's no point.
Part IV
Note Note Note
338 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The Flow Control pop-up menu has options for None, CTS only, RTS (DTR) only, and
CTS & RTS (DTR). I recommend that you try setting CTS & RTS (DTR) as the first try. The
problem with the CTS & RTS (DTR) setting is that you may experience random hangups
when lots of data is coming in unless your modem init string includes &D0, or, if your init
string uses &D2, it is also properly configured to ignore short periods of DTR going low
(check your modem manual for the S25 S-register setting and try setting it to 50 in the
modem init string). If that's true, try dropping down to CTS only. I ran into some of the
hangups, and haven't had any trouble at all since I switched to CTS only.
Internal PoiverBook bus modems can have the Flow Control pop-up menu set to None; all
other modems must use some sort of flow control.
Tone Dial versus Pulse Dial should be obvious based on your telephone. Tone dialing is
far more prevalent these days. The phone number field should be self-evident, although
you may have to add special prefixes to get through a company or hotel phone system.
Adding the prefix of either 8 or 9 and a comma is a common solution (the comma ensures
a short pause after sending the 8 or the 9 and before dialing the rest of the phone number).
If you must enter a lot of digits in the phone number field to account for a calling card
number, you may have to eliminate all the dashes, which aren't necessary and take up space
in the field. I forget the maximum number of digits it can take, but I ran into it once when
using a calling card number.
Next we come to the Modem Init field. Modem initialization strings have been an unend-
ing source of headaches for Internet users configuring SLIP and PPP accounts. My recom-
mendation is to start with the factory default configuration for your modem (usually
AT&F, AT&Fl, or AT&F2, although the numbers change depending on the modem).
If you use the ISKM Installer to install MacPPP, you get a PPP Preferences file that
contains a number of likely (but untested) modem strings for many modem types. In addi-
tion, even more modem strings are located in a file called Modem Strings in the MacPPP
2.0.1 folder in your ISKM3 Folder.
I should make one uncommon but important point. Make sure that XON/XOFF, or
software flow control, is turned off. On at least one modem, the Telebit QBlazer, MacPPP
fails badly if XON/XOFF is active, and the MacPPP documentation notes that software
flow control should be turned off as well, so Tm assuming that XON/XOFF is Public
Enemy Number One with PPP (or SLIP) accounts.
Note
Chapter 18 ♦ PPP 339
You may wonder what the X2 is doing in my initialization string. I discovered that my
Telebit WorldBlazer doesn't return the BUSY code in the default XI setting, and if the
modem doesn't return that BUSY code, MacPPP has no way to knozv that the line is busy
and it should redial (which it does automatically). Other modems may have a similar
problem.
Finally, the Modem connect timeout field offers you a chance to increase the amount of
time MacPPP will wait for the connection to occur. If it takes MacPPP a long time to
negotiate your connection, you may need to increase this value.
As more alert readers will have noticed, I haven't yet mentioned where you enter your
userid and password. There are two possibilities here, depending on what the PPP server
on your host machine supports. If you're lucky, you can use PPP's Password Authentica-
tion Protocol (PAP) to negotiate your connection. If your server doesn't support that (I
have no idea how common it is), you instead must use a connect script. First, the Authen-
tication dialog (see figure 18.4).
Note: The passioord and id fields may
be left blank to indicate that they are
to be entered at connect time.
fluth. ID: |ptldblts |
Passijoord: [••••a** |
Retries: 1 10 | Timeout: 1 3 | seconds
[Cancel ] [ OK ]
Figure 18.4 MacPPP Authentication dialog.
As you can see, all you do here is enter your Authentication ID and Password into the
appropriate fields. The Auth. ID field holds your userid and the Password field holds
your PPP password, appropriately hidden so others can't see it. If you're really paranoid
about your password, you can leave that field blank and MacPPP will prompt you to
enter it every time you connect.
Click OK to save your changes and return to the Configure Server dialog. If you use the
Authentication dialog, you need not enter anything in the Connect Script dialog, and in
fact, you're best off deleting anything that might be in there. In testing with the servers at
Northwest Nexus, I found that MacPPP would try to run through the Connect Script
information first, and if that failed, it would then fall back to the information from the
Authentication dialog. If, however, the Connect Script dialog was empty, MacPPP sent
the authentication information without worrying about looking for the login and pass-
word prompts. I don't know if this is the standard process for servers or not.
Part IV
Note Note
340 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If you leave the Connect Script blank or configure it incorrectly, and leave the Authentica-
tion dialog empty, MacPPP prompts you for your userid and password, just as you would
have entered them in the Authentication dialog.
If using the Authentication method of logging in to your PPP server machine doesn't
work, you must instead use the Connect Script dialog to script your way in. It's still pretty
easy (see figure 18.5).
Ulnll timeout: [30 | lecondt
<CR>
® Out OlKolt
1 ^
1 OOut ® malt
ogIn:
ID
®0ut OtUalt
Ptidbits
1 0
OOut $ malt
luord:
(g)0ut OlUolt
<g)0ut Ouioit
1 □
(5) Out OU>alt
1 □
®Qut OlUolt
f Cancel ] [ OK ]
Figure 18.5 MacPPP Connect Script dialog.
Basically, all you do in the Connect Script dialog is replicate the process of logging in to
your host manually (and the terminal window can be helpful in figuring out the connect
script). You click an Out button to indicate that MacPPP should send the contents of the
field to the left (and a carriage return if the checkbox is selected for that line), and you
click a Wait button to indicate that MacPPP should wait for the string specified in the field
to appear before moving on to the next line.
If you're unlucky, connecting to your PPP server xvill require more than the eight fields
MacPPP provides here. In that case, if your sewer doesn't support authenticated logins as
discussed previously (which is likely, if it requires more than four send/expect interactions),
your only option may be to use the commercial InterPPP. Actually, that's not entirely true,
since you can do some funky scripting within MacPPP by using special codes like 1 1 (which
drops you into the terminal window at that point in the script), \r (which sends a Return to
the host), and \d (which forces a short delay). The trick when creating such a hacked script is
to use delays instead of the Wait buttons, thus enabling you to cram more functional script
lines into the same space.
My connect script in figure 18.5 says, when translated: "Send a carriage return as soon as
you're connected. Then wait for the string 'ogin:' to appear, and once you've seen it, send
Note Note Note
Chapter 18 ♦ PPP 341
the username Ttidbits' and a carriage return. Wait for the string 'word:' to appear, and
then send the password and a carriage return." Once you're done scripting here, click OK
to save your script.
The words "login" and "password" often have their first letter or letters removed in scripts
like this, because you never know whether or not the first letter will be capitalized.
Meanwhile, back in the Configure Server dialog, you've probably been wondering what's
inside the LCP Options dialog and the IPCP Options dialog. You really don't want to
know, and I'm not going to show you. Suffice it to say that I'll be very surprised if you
know what to do with the options in there. I certainly don't, and the MacPPP documenta-
tion says that no normal user should ever have to change any of those settings.
Well, that's it for configuring MacPPP. It's quite easy, and in fact, it may be the easiest
method of connecting to the Internet.
Basic Usage
Once it's configured, using MacPPP is a piece of cake. Like InterSLIP, it works in both
manual and automatic modes, so you can either click the Open button in Config PPP or
you can merely open a MacTCP-based program that opens MacTCP, at which point
MacPPP connects automatically. I've found MacPPP's auto-connect feature to be fairly
reliable, although not absolutely guaranteed. It seems that some applications don't quite
play by the rules, and those applications won't work in auto-connect mode.
MacPPP's auto-connect feature only works on the second or subsequent connections after
you restart your Mac if you use Soft Close to close your connection. If you use Hard Close,
MacPPP cannot auto-cojinect. hJonetheless, there are some cases of MacPPP dialing for
apparently no reason that are eliminated with Hard Close, so that's what I always use.
After you click the Open button or have MacPPP connect automatically, you see some
dialogs indicating that MacPPP is dialing, logging in, establishing the PPP link, and
checking for the network. After those dialogs, the little faces under the Open button will
become happy faces and the connection will be complete.
Be careful of the auto-connect mode— if you do something like put TurboGopher in your
Startup Items folder, it will launch on every startup and make MacPPP establish a connec-
tion to the Internet. You're unlikely to do that with TurboGopher, but certain control panels
or extensions also can activate the auto-connect feature, which can be a pain.
Part IV
342 lulernet Starter Kit for Machttosh
Once you've established a PPP connection with MacPPP, you can run any of the MacTCP-
based applications and do whatever you want. If you click the Stats button in Config PPP,
MacPPP presents you with a relatively meaningless dialog full of technical statistics. I've
never bothered with them and I haven't talked to anyone who has, either.
When you're done with your work and want to close your connection, first quit all of
your MacTCP-based applications. Some of them dislike having the connection disappear
from under their little electronic feet. To pull the plug on the PPP connection, you can do
one of two things, depending on how you use MacPPP. First, you can click the Hard
Close button, which hangs up the connection and "locks" MacPPP so that the only way to
establish a new comiection is to click the Open button. This prevents any applications
from forcing MacPPP to open the connection automatically while, say, you're not present.
Second, if it doesn't bother you to possibly have applications dialing your phone behind
your back, you can click the Soft Close button to close a connection. That leaves open the
auto-connect feature for the rest of that session, so launching an application makes
MacPPP establish a new connection.
Overall Evaluation
My only real quibble with MacPPP is that I don't think much of the aesthetics of the
interface (hey, call me an interface snob — I don't mind). Actually, if I wanted to quibble
some more, MacPPP could use some updated documentation, and it would be very nice if
it could dial and redial in the background.
Overall, though, I find MacPPP to be an excellent program and perhaps the simplest way
of establishing a connection to the Internet (assuming that the PPP server in question
supports authentication).
Administrative Details
Larry Blunk and Merit Network deserve kudos for making such a fine program available
to the Macintosh Internet community for free. However, I should note that they cannot
support MacPPP, so if you have problems or questions about it, you should ask on a
mailing list like the Apple Internet Users mailing list (send a message containing the
command info apple-internet-users to listproc^abs . apple . com for information on how
to subscribe) or in a newsgroup like comp . sy s . mac . comm. You can retrieve the latest
version of MacPPP on the Internet from either of the following:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp://merit.edU//pub/ppp/mac/
Chapter 18 ^ PPP 343
MacPPP Add-ons
There are a number of useful little add-ons to MacPPP that can make life easier for you.
Some of them simplify the process of connecting and disconnecting from the Internet
(which is a bit of a pain normally, since you must open the Config PPP control panel to
disconnect, even if you've used the auto-connect feature to connect). Others help you
track how much time you spend online, which is important if you're paying by the
minute or for a long distance call. Unless I mention otherwise, all the utilities in this
section are at the following URL:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Control PPP
This postcardware utility from Richard Buckle makes it
easier for MacPPP users to connect and disconnect.
Control PPP is a Control Strip module that enables you
to connect and disconnect from the Control Strip, and
to open the MacTCP and Config PPP control panels. It
also indicates if MacPPP is open or not, which is handy
for PowerBook users with internal modems. Although
written for Control Strip, Control PPP also works with
MacPPP Control
MacPPP Control from Mark Alldritt is an AppleScript
Addition that enables you to perform limited
AppleScript scripting on MacPPP. You can open and
close the MacPPP connection and test whether or not
the connection is open or closed. MacPPP Control
comes with two sample scripts that I used for a long
time to connect and disconnect. Dennis Whiteman has
written a much more involved script called Toggle PPP
that toggles MacPPP between open and closed
connections and writes a tab-delimited log detailing the
start, stop, and cumulative times relating to your
connection. If you do much with AppleScript and use
MacPPP, you should definitely check out these utilities.
and Toggle PPP
Configure M*cTCP
Configure M«cPPP
some limitations with Desktop Strip, which lets
desktop Macs use Control Strip modules, and probably
with a similar commercial utility called DragStrip.
Part IV
344 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MacPPP QuicKeys and PPPquencer
Richard Buckle's postcardware MacPPP QuicKeys 3.0
and PPPquencer are extensions to CE Software’s
QuicKeys macro utility and to the shareware macro
utility KeyQuencer. These extensions help QuicKeys
and MacPPP communicate, enabling you to control
MacPPP from within QuicKeys or KeyQuencer. They
enable you to open and close MacPPP, choosing a
hard or a soft close when you close it, trigger other
macros based on whether or not MacPPP is open or
closed, and finally jump a specified number of steps
forward or backward in a QuicKeys sequence macro. If
you use QuicKeys or KeyQuencer and MacPPP, you
may want to check out these extensions.
!
iiii
mill
MacPPP QuicKeys
■m
3 items
572.2 MB in disk 59 MB availa
MaoPPP Control MaoPPP Jump MacPPP Decision
0^
9
PPPquencer
2 items 572.2 MB in disk 59 MB av
About
S4,n.,B
191
PPPqu
[^]
lencer PPPquencer
MacPPP Timer
MacPPP Timer Is a small utility application from Eric
Preston that helps you keep track of how much time
you spend connected to your PPP account. You must
launch it manually, but because you can open a
MacPPP session from within MacPPP Timer, that's not
a serious hardship. Once active, MacPPP Timer
automatically displays the amount of time you’re
connected for that session and for a cumulative
amount of time (a month is the default, based on most
providers’ billing schemes). If you’re billed by the hour
and want to keep an eye on your charges, check out
this program.
PPPop
Those who don’t like working with the Config PPP
control panel might want to check out Rob Friefeld’s
free PPPop, which is a small application that serves as
a front end to MacPPP. Like other utilities for control-
ling MacPPP, PPPop enables you to connect or
disconnect, open the MacTCP and Config PPP control
panels, and see the status of your connection at a
glance. The coolest feature of PPPop Is that It plays
sounds from a PPPop Sounds file located in the same
folder. PPPop comes with a set of sounds, and you can
create your own and replace the standard sounds if
you like.
PPPop Version 1.0 written by Rob Friefeld
PPPop is I MkPPP 2D.1 oprrotsr «pplie«t<cn. It puts up « IKiW vInOov oonl«4nlng a
button. Clicking on tb* button brttgs PPP up v takes it down. An arrow on tbt button
shows tho currant itaia of PPP. You oan sat vhaihar to do a “hard* olosa or a ‘soft
olosa*. That's all it doas. Tha MacPPP axtanslon must ba installed for PPPop to run.
The ooda which controls PPP was stolen from Oarrall Turner, who stole it from
MaoPPP 2.01, O 1993 Merit Network, ho. and Tha UntaarsHy of Michigan. Assume
that Merit's copyright it in force. PPPop makes use of cionButton edef by Paul
Celesth. ® 1994 Celestin Company. Thanks to Richard Buokle for valuable assistance.
Thb program is HAOCVARE. Send comments to friefeU^earthlinknf I.
<0 olKk me •»
PPP
V
Chapter 18 ♦ PPP 345
PPPReport and PPPSummarize
PPPReport is a free control panel from Eric de la
Musse that tracks how long you spend connected via
MacPPP, writing the results to a log file, of which
PPPSummarize, a free Excel 5.0 worksheet from Mary
Lindower, can then provide a day-by-day, month-by-
month summary. One neat feature of PPPReport is that
it can log specific Internet port numbers, which means
that you could figure out how much time you spend
downloading via FTP, or reading news, or anything on
the Internet that Is connected with a specific port
number.
PPPReport
PPPReport i.ob3
r~l Loq duration
El Don’t duplicate ports
O Log all ports
Log onig thrsr ports :
[ Vh«r*...
) PPPReport data
[ Creator...
] BBEdit
©fric do la Mjsso- 12/94
•diml O^al vaiot.ca1vacom.fr
Other PPP Implementations
Although I recommend that you start with MacPPP, especially since it is included on the
ISKM disk, there are two other implementations of PPP (soon to be three when MacSLIP
3.0 comes out with its PPP support) that may interest you for one reason or another. You
don't need to bother even investigating these programs if MacPPP works perfectly for
you, as it does for most people.
MacPPP 2.1SD
MacPPP 2.1SD is a hacked version of MacPPP that
has only one difference from the standard MacPPP
2.0.1. As you may have noticed, MacPPP 2.0. 1’s top
port speed setting is 57,600 bps, which is the top
speed of the serial ports on all Macs other than the
660AV, 840AV, and the Power Macs. 57,600 also is a
good bit faster than any existing modem, so the
problem only surfaces when using ISDN, which
(depending on the details) runs at either 64,000 bps
or 128,000 bps, quite a lot faster than MacPPP 2.0.1
supports. Thus, MacPPP 2.1SD (SD stands for Steve
Dagley, the programmer who created it and who can be
reached at sdagleyOzeno.flt.edu) adds port
speeds of 115,000 bps and 230,000 bps. MacPPP
2.1SD does not work with the GeoPort Telecom
Adapter pod nor the Creative Solutions Hustler serial
card, and it conflicts with the Axion serial switch.
Modem connect timeout: |90 | seconds
[ Connect Script...] [ LCP Options... ]
[fluthenticotion...] [IPCP Options...)
[ Done ]
Partly
346 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
InterPPP
InterCon’s InterPPP is the most well-known of the
commercial PPP clients, and as far as I know, like the
others (there are versions from Tribe and Pacer
Software as well) are based on the same code from a
company called FCR. InterPPP’s main advantage over
MacPPP is that It can carry AppleTalk over the PPP
connection. Of course, your host machine must speak
AppleTalk as well as TCP/IP and make useful
AppleTalk services available for this to be of any utility.
In testing, I had trouble getting InterPPP to work with
my PPP server, perhaps in part because InterPPP relies
on CCL scripts (it provides a simple text editor for
editing them, which is nice) that live in your Extensions
folder for configuring the modem. I, and many users to
-r^ tialcyon.com fei l-zitJ— — — —
CannMl tnlnf :
® Uttr
Han*; |p(tcbtli |
Password: [•••••to |
Pkono: |
0 Savo mi password
n R*rrr*d rra of corA*«lko«i •vtry : | | nrbfstos
Statits:
idi«. . .
1 Conned |
1 Duconned |
judge from reports, prefer a simple dialog approach
Instead. You can purchase InterPPP from InterCon
Systems for $99. For more information, contact
InterCon electronically at sales@intercon.com, or at
703-709-5500; 703-709-5555 (fax).
http : / /WWW . intercon . com/ pi/ InterPPP . Html
MacTCP via ARA
Another, less common method of making a MacTCP-based connection, is via Apple
Remote Access, or ARA. ARA is commercial software from Apple that enables you to
make a modem connection to another Mac appear as though you had made that via
LocalTalk or Ethernet (only slower, of course). ARA comes bundled with many models of
the PowerBook, and is also available separately from Apple dealers and mail order
vendors; the street price is about $60 for the ARA 2.0 Client software. 1 include ARA in
this chapter because future versions are slated to use PPP internally to make the connec-
tion, and the use of ARA to access the Internet isn't currently common enough among
Internet access providers to justify an entire chapter.
The advantages of using ARA over MacPPP are that ARA is generally easy to configure,
it's supported by Apple and by most modem vendors, and of course, once you make the
connection, you have AppleTalk services as well as TCP services. At least two Internet
providers. Open Door Networks in Oregon (inf o(aopendoor . com, 503-482-3181 via ARA)
and the non-profit knoware in the Netherlands use ARA as their primary connection
method for Macintosh users. More commonly, though, large organizations with dedicated
Internet access on their networks provide ARA dialup facilities and also support
MacTCP-based Internet access over those connections.
http: //wv/w. opendoor.com/
http : / /wv/w. knoware . nl/
I haven't personally used ARA to access the Internet, although many people have gotten
it to work fine using the network at their organization and a Mac at home. If you work
with a commercial provider like Open Door Networks, most of the following details
Chapter 18 ^PPP 347
won't matter to you, since Open Door Netw'orks w'ill have configured everything for you
such that you only need to double-click on a connection document (see figure 18.6) or
alias file to establish the connection. (Thanks to Alan Oppenheimer for much of this
information.)
- Connect As : ■
(•) Registered User O Quest
Name: | Adam
Password:
] Save mg password
— Connect To : *
Number: 235-8203
□ Use DialAssist [Setup...]
[ Options.,
[( Connect^
Figure 18.6 ARA Connection window.
To use ARA to connect to the Internet, you need a Macintosh with a fast modem, the ARA
client, and MacTCP at home. At work you need a Macintosh running the ARA server (or a
dedicated piece of hardware from a company like Shiva that provides only ARA dialup
facilities), another fast modem, and most importantly, a network link through an IP
gateway (like the Apple IP Gateway or the Shiva FastPath) — the gateway connects the
ARA server's AppleTalk netw^ork to Ethernet and then out to the Internet. So, if you can't
use the Mac at work with MacTCP applications to access the Internet, you won't be able
to do so via ARA, either.
Second, you need a unique IP address which will be assigned to your home Macintosh,
either permanently or by the server each time you dial in, because using a Mac on the
Internet via ARA is just like using a Mac on the Internet in any other way. The person in
charge of your ARA server or your IP gateway will have to set up this IP address for you.
Once you have those two things done, all you may need to do is bring up the ARA
connection to have your Mac at home fully connected to the Internet. If you've never
configured MacTCP before, it is probably already configured correctly for a connection
over ARA. Just to be sure, however, follow these instructions, noting that there are a few
differences between configuring MacTCP for use with PPP or SLIP.
Part IV
348 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
1. Before making the ARA connection, open the MacTCP control panel and make sure
the icon in the upper left-hand comer (the AppleTalk connection) is selected. The
proper icon is usually LocalTalk or Remote Only, but it may be EtherTalk.
2. Click the More button in MacTCP and select Server-addressing (a Manually-
addressed account will work, but is less common in this situation and requires more
work). Make sure nothing is typed into the domain name server information fields.
3. Close MacTCP and bring up the ARA connection.
4. Open MacTCP again, and, if you see a list of zones underneath the icon in the upper
left-hand comer, select the zone containing your IP gateway. If you aren't sure
which zone contains your IP gateway, ask your network administrator.
This ensures that traffic from your Mac will go through the gateway that handles the
encapsulation of packets for Ethernet. Because your Mac at home isn't really on Ethernet,
its packets will be ignored unless you choose a zone in which an IP gateway lives.
Once you've properly configured MacTCP the first time, you should be able to establish
an ARA connection to work any time thereafter. You'll then be able to use the MacTCP-
based applications just as though you were directly connected or were using SLIP or PPP
to make your connection.
That pretty much covers MacPPP and the various different add-ons and other implemen-
tations of PPP that you're likely to run into. For the most part, the answer to the question
of what to try first is MacPPP since it's free and it's included on the disk.
Some people are limited to SLIP accounts though, and for that population, the next
chapter will be of more interest.
SLIPing
Note
Chapter
SLIP
The first thing I want to say is that although 1 recommend PPP over SLIP, in practice the
two methods of connecting to the Internet work almost identically. Performance is
similar, and once SLIP or PPP is set up, ease of use is equally similar. If you don't have
access to a PPP account or for some reason you simply can't get MacPPP to work, there's
nothing wrong with using InterSLIP or one of the other implementations of SLIP and a
SLIP account.
If you skipped chapter 18, "PPP," you may wish to go back and read the first parts to get
a sense of how SLIP and PPP differ, but the short answer is that although they're func-
tionally identical, they're not interchangeable. So, if you're using a PPP account, you can't
use InterSLIP or VersaTerm SLIP with it. They simply won't work, and the reverse is true
as well.
You may also hear about CSLIP accounts. CSLIP stands for Compressed SLIP, and it's
generally handled by an option in the SLIP program. You don't need different SLIP software
to use a CSLIP account.
CSLIP might also be referred to as SLIP using Van Jacobsen header compression or RFC
1144 TCP header compression. It does not compress the data being transferred, it just
reduces the amount ofoiferhead information that needs to be transferred over the modem.
SLIP provides an Internet connection for people who connect via modem. If you have a
network, either Ethernet or LocalTalk, connected to the Internet, you don't need SLIP.
Note
350 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
The easiest way to understand SLIP is to pretend that you don't have water service inside
your house. Every time you want to take a shower, you must run a garden hose to the
water hookup outside, take your shower, and then reel the hose back in. That's exactly
what SLIP does — it establishes a temporary, low-speed connection to the Internet. You
must create that connection before you can run programs such as MacWeb and Fetch.
Although some implementations of SUP enable you to launch a MacTCP-based program
without connecting first (the SUP software sees lohat's up and then establishes the connec-
tion), Vve found that these auto-connect features can be flaky. If you can use one, great, but if
it doesn't work reliably, connect manually first.
SLIP for the Macintosh currently has three different implementations (not counting
programs that support SLIP internally, because they're of no use if you want to use
another program that doesn't support SLIP internally). Two are commercial, MacSLIP
from Hyde Park Software and VersaTerm SLIP from Synergy Software. The third comes
from InterCon Systems, a company that has released numerous Internet products, some
of which support SLIP internally. InterCon has released this last SLIP, called InterSLIP, as
freeware on the Internet, and has graciously allowed me to include it on the disk that
comes with this book.
In this chapter, I concentrate on InterSLIP because the other SLIP implementations, being
commercial, come with printed documentation and support, and because, in many ways,
they are all similar. I'll point out the few differences that I've encountered and comment
about why you might want to use one over another.
Chapter 19^ SUP 351
Getting an Account
When it comes time for you to get a SLIP account, you should check back in chapter 11,
''Choosing a Connection," for information on how to pick an Internet access provider.
Once you decide on a provider, you need certain information from that provider to
configure InterSLIP or other SLIP software. For convenience, I list the most common
pieces of information you need in Table 19.1.
Table 19.1
SLIP Information
Item
Question
Phone Number
Login Name
What number do I call to connect to the server?
What is my SLIP account login name? (This name can be
different from your userid or machine name.)
Password
MTU
What password should I provide when logging in?
What is the maximum transmission unit size? (1,006
seems to be the standard MTU for SLIP; I've heard of
using 296 for CSLIP.)
Header Compression
Should I use RFC 1144 TCP Header Compression (also
known as CSLIP)?
Login Procedure
What should I expect to receive from your host machine
and how should my Mac respond when logging in?
IP Address
What is my IP number (if a manually addressed
account)?
Gateway Address
What is my gateway IP number (if a manually
addressed account)?
Domain Name Server
What is the IP number of my primary domain name
server?
Again, it's probably easiest to use the worksheet in the back of this book for recording
all of this information. I'll cover InterSLIP first and then look at other SLIP software and
add-ons.
Part IV
Note Note
352 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
InterSLIP
InterCon's InterSLIP is one of the most popular pieces of software among the Macintosh
Internet crowd because it is freeware that offers functionality equivalent to commercial
programs. That's a good way to make friends. InterCon has graciously allowed me to
include it on the disk that comes with this book.
My examples and screen shots in this section apply specifically to configuring my modem, a
Telebit WorldBlazer, with a manually addressed SLIP account. Your settings will he
differeiU; I guarantee if. For a step-by-step walk-through of how to install InterSLIP for a
sewer-addressed account with Northwest Nexus, checkout chapter 29, "Step-by-Step
Internet."
Installation and Setup
Installing InterSLIP requires placing an extension called InterSLIP in your Extensions
folder. If you drag it onto the System Folder icon. System 7 places InterSLIP in the correct
location. A control panel called InterSLIP Control is also available (and generally installed
by default), but in fact it's entirely unnecessary for System 7 users; it is only required for
use with System 6. The application called InterSLIP Setup can live an)^vhere on your hard
disk, but it may be a good idea to put it or an alias to it in your Apple Menu Items folder
for easy access. After you place those parts in the proper places, restart your Mac. Make
sure InterSLIP is selected in the MacTCP main window, and then proceed with configur-
ing InterSLIP.
On the disk in the back of the book, the ISKM Installer's custom options that include
InterSLIP install all of the parts of InterSLIP in the proper places. Just as with MacTCP and
MacPPP, I provide the detail here in case you install InterSLIP from some other source (such
as an update) or merely want to know how the manual installation process works.
Although InterSLIP Setup and InterSLIP Control share similar interfaces and functions,
you use InterSLIP Setup to configure your connection. InterSLIP Control enables you to
select a configuration and connect and disconnect, but you must configure it from
InterSLIP Setup (hence the name, I suppose) (see figure 19.1). Frankly, if you use System
7, I'd recommend throwing InterSLIP Control out. I haven't had it installed for months
now, and it's made no difference at all.
Chapter 19 ^ SLIP 353
InterSLIP^^
<ld1»>
[( Connec^^j[ Disconnect )
ha1cyon.com SLIP config
SLIP configuration
VorldBlazer nwnoxus
biterSLIP
. 0.1
InterSLIP Control
InterSLIP 1 .0.1
Configuration :
<Not connected >
halcyon.com SLIP config
SLIP configuration
VorldBlazer InterSLIP
VorldBlazer nv/nexus
[ Connect ) [ Disconnect )
Copyright © 1993 InterCon Systems
Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Figure 19.1 InterSLIP Setup and InterSLIP Control.
To create a new configuration, launch InterSLIP Setup, and from the File menu choose
New. InterSLIP Setup prompts you for a name with a dialog box; give your configuration
a name (it doesn't matter what) and click on the OK button. Although InterSLIP Setup
provides no way of deleting a configuration from within the program, configuration files
are stored in an automatically created InterSLIP Folder within the Preferences folder. If
you create a configuration you don't want to keep, throw out its file from this folder.
After you create the configuration, you must configure it for your particular modem and
account. You need information from your system administrator to configure InterSLIP, so
be prepared to give your provider a call if you didn't get it all when you signed up for the
account. Double-click on the configuration you just created to bring up the configuration
dialog (see figure 19.2).
Let's take it from the top left of the dialog. The serial port should generally be set to your
Modem port, although you could attach a modem to your Printer port. If you use a
PowerBook with an internal bus modem that connects directly to the CPU (such as the
Apple Express Modem and the Global Village PowerPort/ Mercury for the PowerBook
500 series and the PowerBook Duo), you get an Internal Modem choice, and the
PowerBook 500 series may show a Printer-Modem Port choice. Although I don't have
such a modem to test, I suspect that if you have a nonbus internal PowerBook modem,
you should choose the Modem port, just as with MacPPP (also see the notes about bus
modems in chapter 18, "PPP").
The Baud Rate setting is the rate at which your modem and your Mac communicate,
which is why there is no setting for 14,400, since that's a speed at which the two modems
Part IV
Note
354 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
communicate (and some modems cannot even accept a port speed of 14,400 or 28,800
bps). The speed that the Mac and the modem communicate should be set faster than
the speed that the modems communicate to take advantage of modem compression
capabilities.
- lilorldBlazer InterSLIP
Stria! Port :
1 Modem Port ▼ |
Gateway ; I Simple UNIX/Telebit ▼ I
Baud Rato :
1 19200 ▼ 1
Username; | tidbits ]
Data Bits;
1 e -1
0 Prompt for password at connect time
Stop Bits ;
L?
Parity :
1 None ▼ 1
^ Hardware Handshaking
IP Address . 1 192.135.191 .128 |
l~1 Speaker on while dialing
Nameserver; 1 192.135.191 .1 |
Dial Script;
1 Haues©-Compatible Mod...'^ I
^ RFC 1 1 44 TCP Header Compression
Dial;
1 Tone ▼ 1
MTU Size; |l0O6 |
Phone No. ;
1 343-8558 |
Modem Init ;
||AT«cF9 I
f Cancel ) |[ OK j]
Figure 19.2 InterSLIP corjfiguration dialog.
Data Bits, Stop Bits, and Parity are almost always set as I have them here, to 8 data bits, 1
stop bit, and no parity, although I suppose it's possible that some providers are different.
The Hardware Handshaking checkbox requires that you have a hardware handshaking
cable, and if you have a fast modem, you should have one of those. I've heard that if you
don't have a hardware handshaking cable but attempt to use that checkbox, it may cause
InterSLIP to hang.
Turning the speaker on or off is up to you, although I generally recommend you leave it
on until you have everything working for a few days. Then, when the modem screams
start to irritate you, turn it off.
Depending on your modem and your modem initialization string, InterSLIP sometimes
seems to ignore the speaker checkbox. You can always override it by adding MO to your
initialization string to turn off the modem speaker.
The Dial Script pop-up menu defaults to Direct Connection, something I doubt most
people have. The other built-in choice is Hayes-Compatible Modem, and I recommend
you choose that option to start with. I certainly hope your modem is Hayes-compatible;
you're likely to have trouble if it's not. Unfortunately, even if your modem claims it's
Hayes-compatible, that doesn't inherently mean that it works with the Hayes-Compatible
modem script in InterSLIP. Luckily, InterSLIP supports other modems through the use of
Note Note
Chapter 19 ♦ SUP 355
dialing scripts written in the CCL (Connection Control Language). CCL scripts are prima-
rily used with Apple Remote Access (ARA). You can find many dialing scripts (their
names start with scr and generally include a modem name as well) in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Dialing scripts are text files that are venj similar to ARA (Apple Remote Access) scripts.
The only difference is that ARA turns off data compression and error correctioUr whereas
those two settings should be on for an InterSLIP dialing script Many modem vendors will
send you an ARA script for your modem, if it wasn't included, and you can find many ARA
scripts in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/ara/
You can add dialing scripts to the Dialing folder inside the InterSLIP Folder inside the
Preferences folder. To edit an ARA script, you may have to use Shift-Open in Word or
Nisus's All Files option in its Catalog to be able to open the ARA script. These scripts are
text-only, but they tend to come with a type and creator that prevents text editors from
reading them. Make sure to save as text when you're done, though. Dialing scripts can be
very important — for some modems, they're even essential.
I've found that many dialing scripts have huge amounts of useless sections; Fred Morris
has written a minimal dialing script that works well with many modems, assuming the
modem initialization string you use is correct. I added redial capabilities to the script and
included it on the disk so that the ISKM Installer installs it for InterSLIP by default. It's
called Minimal Dialing Script, and aside from being able to redial, it's useful because it
tends to be more effective at hanging up your modem when you click on the Disconnect
button in InterSLIP, something the Hayes-Compatible Modem choice has trouble doing
with some modems. Enough about the Dial Script menu; stick with Hayes-Compatible
Modem or my Minimal Dialing Script, if you can.
Considering how much technical support costs, the people at InterCon help you with
InterSLIP only if you are also a registered user of one of their other programs. I think that
arrangement is extremely fair because they've already provided a great service to the Internet
community by releasing InterSLIP for free. So please, do not expect support from InterCon
unless you purchase one of their other products.
The next three items, which control the dialing method, phone number, and modem
initialization string, don't appear until you choose Hayes-Compatible Modem or another
dialing script. I hope that when these items appear, it is relatively obvious how to fill
Part IV
Note
356 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
them in. Most people have tone dialing these days (although the few people with pulse
dialing would do well to check dialing scripts for ATDT commands and replace them
with ATDP commands), and your system administrator should tell you the phone
number when you get the account. The modem initialization string is a bit trickier, but
most modern modems support something like AT&Fl for setting the factory default
standard options. As you can see, my WorldBlazer goes all out on the &F parameters; I
must use AT&F9, which turns on hardware handshaking for the Macintosh. Look in your
modem manual or in another communications program that comes with settings for
popular modems to figure out the most appropriate initialization string.
I've also included a file containing many modem strings on the disk. The ISKM Installer has
the information in the installer help text, and the file is installed in the InterSLlP 1.0. 1 folder
(not the InterSLlP Folder that lives in your Preferences folder). These modem strhigs are
generally untested, but should either work or put you on the right track.
The most important thing to watch for here is the hardware handshaking setting. Not
only do you want to make sure your initialization string turns on hardware handshaking,
but you also want to make sure that software handshaking, more commonly known as
XON/XOFF, is turned off. If XON/XOFF is turned on in the modem initialization string
or is part of the factory default settings (as it is for the Telebit QBlazer modem), InterSLlP
almost certainly won't work right.
At the top right of the window is another pop-up menu labeled Gateway. It defaults to
Direct Connection, but again, I think the other option. Simple UNIX/Telebit, is more
commonly used. The Simple UNIX/Telebit script simply looks for the login prompt,
sends your userid, looks for the password prompt, sends your password, and assumes
there's nothing more to do before starting SLIP. Unfortunately, that's not always true.
Just as with dialing scripts, you can write your own gateiuay script in the Connection
Control Language and place it in the Gateway Scripts folder in the InterSLlP Folder.
Unfortunately, if you have a nonstandard gateway, you probably will have to write your
own, although I've collected a few of them in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
(Look for "scr" in the beginning of the name, and the name of a provider, university,
person, or server such as Annex or Cisco in the rest of the name.)
The gateway script is a conversation between your computer and your host computer as
your computer tries to log in to the host. There's no telling what sort of prompts your host
sends or what it requests, so again, I can't help much with specifics here. I strongly
recommend that you work through the process manually using a terminal emulator to see
what the host sends and what it expects back. After you've done that, you stand a chance
of converting that information into a gateway script. Also, ask your system administrator
to advise you of any quirks in logging in.
Note Note
Chapter 19 ^ SLIP 357
Afexu people need to use luhat's called a dialback system xohich,for securih/ reasons, makes
you log in normally, then hangs up and calls you back at a prespecified phorte number.
Although a truly hairy process, you could write a gateivay script that, instead of just logging
in, would log in, hang up the phone, set autoanszoer, xvait for a RING, ansioer the phone,
wait for a CONNECT, and then proceed xuith the rest of the script. Nasty, but possible.
In general, you usually send a return, the host sends a login: prompt, you send your login
name, the host provides a Password: prompt, you send your password, and then some-
thing else happens. For instance, if you use a server-addressed account, the gateway script
must include some method of finding the IP number that the server assigns to you — it
usually appears after you send the password. I've included a gateway script that works
with the Northwest Nexus server-addressed accounts, and I recommend that you use it as
an example of how to write your own (not that it's a paragon of scripting virtue, but it
does work).
Many people ask where they can find more information on scripting in the CCL language
that InterSLIP uses for both dialing and gateway scripts. Unfortunately, the best information
available is in InterSLIP' s documentation, so you've got it already. Maybe someone xvill
xorite a CCL tutorial and post it on the nets. (Hint hint!)
If you have trouble making InterSLIP connect, you might also try a hack with which some
people have reported success. Set InterSLIP to Direct Connection in both the Dial Script
menu and the Gateway menu. Then, using a terminal emulator, dial your host machine,
and at the point when SLIP starts on the host, click on InterSLIP's Connect button. It's a
hack indeed (ordinarily you'd never use a terminal emulator to dial a SLIP account), but it
might work while you figure out a gateway script.
Let's move on to the User name field in the InterSLIP configuration dialog. Most of the
time, your system administrator assigns this name to you, along with a password, al-
though you may get to pick them yourself. Your username may or may not be related to
your machine name or your email address. It's simply the name you use to log in to your
SLIP account. Make sure you enter your username in lowercase — Unix is case-sensitive,
so Adam is not the same account as adam, and your password won't work with a mixed-
case username if it were created with a lowercase username.
I've checked the Prompt for password at connect time checkbox in the InterSLIP configu-
ration dialog because publishing a screen shot of my password isn't a terribly clever thing
to do in terms of security. However, if that checkbox isn't checked, you get another text
field that holds your password. If you don't mind the security risk of having your pass-
word visible here, go ahead and enter it, being careful to enter it exactly as it was created.
Passwords are always case sensitive, so make sure you match the case of each letter or
else the host will reject it.
Partly
Note
358 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The next four items — IP Address, Nameserver, checkbox for RFC 1144 TCP Header
Compression, and MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) Size — require information from
your provider. You can see the sorts of things Pve put in, but your situation may be
entirely different (and your IP Address and Nameserver certainly are). Again, if your
provider tells you that you have a CSLIP account, make sure to check the TCP Header
Compression checkbox. Even if the term CSLIP isn't mentioned, make sure to check vs^ith
your administrator, because if the TCP Header Compression setting in InterSLIP doesn't
match what your account has set, strange errors will result.
After you're all done, click on the OK button to save your changes. If you have more than
one SLIP account on different hosts, you can create additional configuration files and
switch between them in InterSLIP Setup by selecting the one you want before you click on
the Connect button.
Basic Usage
Clicking on the triangle in the upper left of the InterSLIP Setup window shrinks the
window to display only the Connect and Disconnect buttons and the area that displays
the connection status (see figure 19.3).
InterSLIP’^
<ldle>
Connect
Disconnect
Figure 193 hiterSLIP Setup window, shrunk.
If you have only one configuration, the only reason to leave the window expanded is if
you need to edit your configuration frequently (wliich shouldn't be the case). InterSLIP
Setup also remembers where on the screen you put it, so it's easy to put it out of the way
and leave it active most of the time. InterSLIP Setup takes only 128K of RAM, so it's no
great liability.
There's a bug in InterSLIP Setup related to the zoay it remembers where you place the
window. If you put InterSLIP Setup's loindoio on a second monitor (assuming you have tzoo
attached to your Macintosh, as I do), then move or remove that monitor, InterSLIP Setup
will almost certainly crash on launch. To solve the problem, throw away the InterSLIP
Preferences file in your InterSLIP Folder. All that's stored there is the window location and
the selected configuration file, so it's no loss.
You have two ways to use InterSLIP to connect to your host, manually and automatically.
The manual method takes more effort because you must click on the Connect button in
InterSLIP Setup, but it works much more reliably. The automatic method is exactly that.
Note
Chapter 19^ SLIP 359
automatic, so whenever you launch Fetch or Eudora or any program that requests
MacTCP services, InterSLIP kicks in and connects to your host. Or at least that's the idea.
The problem with the automatic technique is that it doesn't work all the time. When it
doesn't work, you must usually force quit (hold down the Command and Option keys
and press Escape) the MacTCP application that couldn't connect and then restart the
machine, because something at a low level has been hosed. I had trouble using the
automatic connection with a number of the applications I discuss later in this section, and
everything based on HyperCard caused trouble. Even such usually well-behaved applica-
tions as Fetch sometimes caused problems, perhaps because the connection takes longer
than it was prepared to wait. As neat and useful as the automatic connection feature is,
therefore, I cannot recommend using it if you use a wide variety of MacTCP software. If
you primarily use Eudora, you're probably okay — but even then, make sure you have
work in other applications saved before you attempt to start an automatic connection.
Either way, manual or automatic, when asked, InterSLIP dials your host, signs in, and
then lets you get on with your work. You see various messages (they're stored in the
dialing script and the gateway script) in the status area in the upper right of the InterSLIP
Setup window that tell you what InterSLIP thinks is happening, most notably the Con-
nected message when you have connected successfully. When you aren't connected, it
should say Idle. As soon as you connect, the Connect button becomes disabled and the
Disconnect button becomes enabled. There is no automatic disconnection, so you must
make sure to click the Disconnect button when you're finished.
Many people have asked for a way to have InterSLIP disconnect automatically when they're
finished, say, downloading their mail with Eudora, but there's 7to way this can happen
without additional work on your part, Eudora has no way of knowing how the connection
has been established or even that you use InterSLIP. And, InterSLIP can't know when you're
done and when you might want to do something else. You could, hoivever, script this
behavior with QuicKeys, AppleScript, or Frontier. Using the latter two may be easier with
InterSLIP! AE, a little program written by Leonard Rosenthol to control InterSLIP via Apple
events. See the capsule review following this section.
Now you know all there is to using InterSLIP, but there are a few tricks that I want to
mention.
SLIPing
I don't know how common this situation is, but with some SLIP hosts, for which you pay
for the time you're connected, a timeout is set to hang up the phone line after a certain
amount of idle time. If you think about it, this is a feature, not a bug; otherwise, you could
get called away from the computer while using your SLIP account, forget about it en-
tirely, and find yourself faced with a much larger usage bill. The timeout generally works
well, but it does modify how you work.
Part IV
360 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If (and only if!) you use the same IP address every time you connect and your connection
hangs up on you before you are finished, switch back to InterSLIP Setup, click the Discon-
nect button, and then click the Connect button. After you reestablish the connection, you
can switch back into your MacTCP application and continue where you
left off.
If, however, you use server addressing (in which the server assigns an IP address to you
each time you log in), you must quit the active MacTCP programs before you reconnect
via SLIP! Because you may end up with a different IP address when you call back after
being disconnected, MacTCP programs may become extremely flustered at the change,
and there's no predicting what could happen (but it probably involves crashing).
You must decide whether the timeout bothers you or not. As long as you can easily see
the connection lights on your modem (assuming you're not using an internal PowerBook
modem), you can tell when the line has hung up. If you want to keep the line open, you
must keep doing things that access the network. One trick is to run Peter Lewis's
shareware Talk program whenever you're connected, because it queries the network
periodically. There are other tricks that work equally as well, such as havdng Eudora
check your mail every four or five minutes.
More likely, though, you must figure out the proper methods of working. For instance, in
a newsreader you can certainly open a bunch of articles or threads at once and then read
them all onscreen. Unless you're a very fast reader, though, the connection will almost
certainly get bored and hang up on you. Unless you want to treat the newsreader as an
offline newsreader in this way, it might work better to read only one article or thread at a
time, making sure that the newsreader periodically has to ask for more articles. In addi-
tion, you see that if you ask for a bunch of tlireads all at once, it takes a long time to get
them, whereas if you go for the one-at-a-time approach, you can read constantly. Either
approach has pros and cons, and it's up to you to decide which best fits your working
style.
The program that can work best in this environment, of course, is one like Eudora or
NewsHopper, which can log in, send and receive queued messages, and then log out
immediately, letting you do all your work while disconnected from the network. Unfortu-
nately, none of the freeware newsreaders have this feature quite yet, although it does exist
in NewsHopper and the newsreader built into Synergy's VersaTerm-Link.
Using System 6
Frankly, I know little about using InterSLIP with System 6, mostly because I haven't used
System 6 in almost four years. However, despite the note on the cover about requiring
System 7, you may be able to use System 6 for some tasks.
To establish a connection with InterSLIP, you must have InterSLIP Control (a control
panel) installed. As long as you have InterSLIP Control installed, InterSLIP should work
the same as it does under System 7.
Note
Chapter 19 ♦ SUP 361
Much of the Internet software released today requires System 7, so you may not be able to
use it at all under System 6. That's the price of not upgrading. Eudora 1.4 and later require
System 7, for instance, but Qualcomm keeps Eudora version 1.3.1 around for System 6
users. It's at:
ftp://ftp.quaXcoinni.eom/quest/mac/eudora/ 1 . 3 /eudora 131 .hqx
Overall Evaluation
InterSLIP's primary neat feature, other than the fact that it works well, is its automatic
connect feature, which unfortunately I find to be problematic. A feature I'd like to see in
InterSLIP is the capability to show a terminal window of the connection (or even let you
navigate in manually!) and capture a log of what happens during connection to ease
troubleshooting.
One existing feature that I didn't much think of originally but have come to appreciate is
that InterSLIP dials (and redials, if you have a dialing script that redials) in the back-
ground. That means you can click the Connect button in InterSLIP and then go back to
whatever you were doing until it finishes connecting. In contrast, MaePPP puts up a
modal dialog that prevents you from doing anything else while it dials.
Even if InterSLIP doesn't have every imaginable feature, it's free and it's on the ISKM
disk, so it's hard to complain too loudly. And, if for some reason you don't like InterSLIP
or you have trouble getting it to work, you can always buy one of the other two SLIP
programs or use PPP and MaePPP.
Administrative Details
As I've said, InterSLIP is free from InterCon Systems. InterCon does not support
InterSLIP, so if you have trouble, try posting in comp . sys . mac . comm. Doing so often
results in help from other users or from InterSLIP's author. Also consider asking on a
mailing list like the Apple Internet Users mailing list (send a message containing the
command info apple-internet-users to listproc@abs . apple - com for information on
how to subscribe). InterCon runs its own FTP site at ftp . intercon . com, and you can find
the latest version of InterSLIP there or on ftp . tidbits . com:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp://ftp.intercon.com/intercon/sales/InterSLIP/
Part IV
362 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
InterSLIP Add-Ons
There are a few utilities that enhance the experience of working with InterSLIP, mostly
making the act of connecting and disconnecting easier. Some other utilities help you time
how long you spend online, which is useful for folks who call long distance or who must
pay by the minute for their Internet connections. Unless I mention otherwise, all the
utilities following are in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
InterSLIP /AE
Leonard Rosenthors free InterSLIP/AE is a tiny
application that does little more than enable you to
control InterSLIP using scripts written in AppleScript,
Frontier, or QuicKeys. It does have a minimal interface
that lets you connect and can display the connection
status and configuration. It’s a must for anyone who
wants to automate connections via InterSLIP and a
scripting application.
InterSLIP Strip Module
Troy Gaul's freeware InterSLIP Strip Module brings
control of InterSLIP to users of Apple's Control Strip on
PowerBooks and to those who use Desktop Strip or
DragStrip (like me) on desktop Macs. InterSLIP Strip
Module enables you to connect and disconnect
InterSLIP sessions, (I got an error in my screen shot—
oh well), and open the InterSLIP Setup application. If
you use InterSLIP and Control Strip or another utility
that supports Control Strip modules, this one's
definitely worth a look.
InttrSUP Errcr
Op»n InterSLIP S»tup
■M
InterSLIP Timer
InterSLIP Timer from Eric Preston is a small $5
shareware application that times both the session
connection time and the cumulative connection time,
making it easy for you to determine how large your
Internet or phone bill will be at the end of the month.
You must launch it manually, but you can also use it to
start and end your InterSLIP session. Once active,
InterSLIP Timer displays a small floating window that
contains both the session time and the cumulative
time.
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Chapter 19 ^ SLIP 363
Other SLIP Software
Although I recommend InterSLIP as the first SLIP program you should try, that's mostly
because it's free and it works well for many people. There are also several other imple-
mentations of SLIP that work better for some users. One of them, VersaTerm SLIP, is
notable because it's easier to configure than either InterSLIP or the other commercial
contender, MacSLIP.
InterSLIP 1.02d2
The current version of InterSLIP is 1.0.1, and for most
people, that’s the version to stick with. However,
Amanda Walker has tweaked some of the code in
InterSLIP and produced a 1.0. 2d2 (d2 means the
second development release) version. It fixes some
problems and introduces others (that’s why it’s a
development release and not official). The main fixes
include some MacTCP performance enhancements,
the addition of the term “CSLIP" to the RFC 1144 TCP
Header Compression checkbox, the ability to disable
automatic connections, better detection of dropped
connections, and most notably, support for 115,200
and 230,400 bps port speeds, mostly for compatibility
with ISDN connections. If you're having trouble with
InterSLIP and think 1.0.2d2 might help, give It a try,
but again, don’t complain if it doesn’t help. The fact
that InterCon makes it available at all (and it may have
removed this version by the time you read this) is a
huge help and must not be abused.
ftp://ftp.intercon.eom//intercon/test/InterSLIP-1 .0.2d2.sea.hqx
MacSLIP
MacSLIP was written by Rick Watson of Hyde Park
Software and is marketed and supported by TriSoft.
MacSLIP 2.0 costs $49.95 and may offer the largest
feature set of all three SLIPs. MacSLIP 2.0 has only a
control panel and a MacSLIP extension. MacSLIP 2.0
sports an automatic connection feature, ships with a
number of modem Initialization strings, can notify you
of your connection time, and displays statistics about
the IP address, connect time, and serial line from
within the control panel. My main complaint about
MacSLIP Is that the scripting language used to connect
to your host — although certainly full-featured — is not
the sort of thing a novice wants to mess with.
Conversely, for an accomplished scripter, MaeSLIP’s
scripting language may be just what you've always
wanted. You can get more Information about MacSLIP
by sending email to inf o^hydepark . com, and
MacSLIP 2.0 ships with MicroPhone Pro, or you can
order It alone for $49.95 from TriSoft at 800-531-
5170, 512-472-0744, or 512-473-2122 (fax).
Part IV
364 hiternet Starter Kit for Macintosh
VersaTerm SLIP
Synergy Software claims that VersaTerm SLIP was the
first commercially available SLIP for the Macintosh,
and in my experience, it's also stable and reliable.
VersaTerm SLIP includes an extension, a control panel,
and an application, VersaTerm AdminSLIP, with which
you interact. Of all the SLIP implementations,
VersaTerm AdminSLIP uses the easiest method of
writing a script, providing a simple dialog box for
creating the login script. In addition, VersaTerm
AdminSLIP includes a simple but useful terminal
emulator. You can’t buy VersaTerm SLIP by itself; it
comes with Synergy Software's other VersaTerm
packages, which range widely In price and capability.
ilMl^. UersaTerm AdminSLIP
SLIP Connection:
SLIP Seruer:
^ { Connect 8€K j
1 halcyon.com '▼’1
1 1
[ Configure... ]
You also get the VersaTerm*Link program with
VersaTerm SLIP; It’s discussed in chapter 28,
"Integrated Programs." You can contact Synergy to find
out more about buying any of its programs via the
Internet at maxwell@sales . synergy . com, via
phone at 215-779-0522, or via fax at 215-370-0548.
But What If. . .
Well, you should now be as much of an expert on SLIP, and InterSLEP in particular, as I
can make you. The silly part of this and the previous two chapters is that once you have
installed and configured MacTCP and either InterSLIP or MacPPP, your only interaction
with them is opening and closing the connection. However, that assumes everything goes
as planned, and as we all know, Murphy's Law has yet to be declared unconstitutional.
Shall we move on to some troubleshooting information, then? Of course, if everything is
working properly with your connection, in defiance of Murphy and the laws of nature,
feel free to ignore the next chapter entirely.
Chapter
Troubleshooting Your
Connection
If you went through the various steps in the previous chapters to configure MacTCP and
either InterSLIP or MacPPP and everything works, congratulations! Skip this chapter
entirely, since it can get a bit technical in places and if everjThing works, there's no need
to dwell on what might not work. Most people don't have much trouble, but there are
some pitfalls to avoid and some tricks and tips I've learned since the first edition of this
book. I'd like to share some of the problems and solutions with you here, and although I
hope you don't need to read this section, if you do, I hope it helps. I've formatted the
section along the lines of an Internet FAQ, or Frequently Asked Question, list. Within
each section. I've tried to organize the question and answers roughly as you might
experience them — for example, there's no point in putting suggestions about improving
performance before suggestions about how to get around a modem problem and connect
in the first place.
Note
366 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Reporting Problems
Before I even begin to talk about what might go wrong, I want to say a few words about
how you can best go about isolating problems and then reporting them on the nets or to
tech support. If you ask for help on comp . sys . mac . comm by posting a note that says
something like, "I'm connecting to the nets via SLIP and it doesn't work. What am I doing
wrong?" you won't get any helpful responses. You probably won't get any responses at
all, helpful or not, since people will have no clue what your problem is other than the fact
that you don't know how to ask for help. If you follow the steps that I suggest when
working through any problem, not only problems with MacTCP, MacPPP, or InterSLIP,
you'll be better off.
When you've determined that you have a problem, do the following: Start over com-
pletely from scratch, removing from the System Folder all files related to MacTCP and
MacPPP or InterSLIP, including preferences files.
One quick way to find all these files for quick renwval is to use the Find command in the
Finder's File menu to search for "TCP" and either "PPP" or "InterSLIP/' I recommend not
actually deleting these files until you're up and running again, just in case, but that's lohy
Apple created a persistent Trash.
After you've removed the old files, carefully follow each step in the instructions, noting
anything that doesn't seem to mesh between your setup and what the instructions say. If
you deviate from the instructions, note that, too. In many cases, following this procedure
will either solve the problem or reveal where it lies. Taking something apart and putting
it back together often fixes problems for no apparent reason. Don't think of this process as
an unpleasant chore, because then you're likely to become careless and miss an important
clue. Troubleshooting can be a lot of fun, because you learn a lot more about the topic at
hand, and you get to solve a real-life mystery in which no one dies.
Unfortunately, because we're all amateur sleuths, we're not always able to find the
solution to a problem and must consult others who are more knowledgeable or who hav^e
a different way of looking at the problem. If you are having trouble with a commercial
program, the first experts to turn to should be the technical support staff at the company
that produced your program. I've heard good things about most of the technical support
staffs of companies that make Internet applications, although quality tech support is
never guaranteed.
When dealing with telephone tech support people, keep in mind that they probably know
a lot more about the program in question than you do, they answer a huge number of
calls every day, and the job has a high burnout rate because it's so stressful. You're most
likely to get the best help if you're polite and cooperate with what they ask you to do. If
Note
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 367
you call and announce that you're a power user and why doesn't this stupid program
work anyway, you're unlikely to get decent help. If, on the other hand, you call, say that
you're having troubles, and give the information the tech support person asks for, she can
do a much better job. It never pays to alienate the person whom you're asking for help —
whatever is wrong is almost certainly not her fault.
If you are using a freeware or shareware application, it usually says whether or not the
author is willing to help via direct email. One way or another, though, there are several
places where you can ask for help from other users, many of whom are true experts. Also,
the developers of many of the freeware and shareware utilities tend to hang out in these
same places and help their users, even if they prefer not to be continually slammed by
personal email. The best place to ask for help with Internet stuff is on the Usenet
newsgroup comp . sys .mac . comm. There are also many knowledgeable people who hang
out in the Apple Internet Users mailing list, which you can subscribe to by sending email
to listproc@abs.apple.com with the command subscribe apple-intemet-users Your
Name in the body of the message. If you can post to a newsgroup, there are often
newsgroups specific to your provider where local folks hang out and answer questions,
like the halcyon . slip group at Northwest Nexus.
If you don't read a newsgroup regularly, you should explicitly ask for replies via email so you
don't miss any replies.
No matter what, if you want any of these people to help you, you must help them first by
sending a complete report. In that report, you should include the following:
■ List exactly what it is that you're trying to accomplish. This should be specific,
because telling someone that you want to read Usenet news with NewsWatcher isn't
salient to the problem of not being able to get InterSLIP to connect. Take each goal a
step at a time.
■ Mention the fact that you have carefully followed the directions. This fact tells
people that (a) you're not a complete idiot and can read, (b) that you have gone
through a certain set of procedures already, and it tells them that you are capable of
following any suggestions they make. If you haven't followed the directions care-
fully, don't bother posting until you do so.
■ List the salient facts of your software and hardware setup. Include things such as
what Mac you have, what modem you use, what version of the System software
you're running, and any weird stuff that you can't eliminate from the testing (such
as, for example, an Outbound user who had additional software from Outbound
that was necessary for his machine to boot properly). Unless asked, don't bother
listing out every extension and control panel on your hard disk. You should have
already eliminated them in the process of testing by removing everything but
MacTCP and either InterSLIP or PPP and Config PPP from your Extensions and
Control Panels folders. Also, an unusually long report will turn many people off.
Trouble-
shooting Your
Connection
Note
368 Interfiet Starter Kit for Macintosh
■ Talk a bit about what you have already tried, whether or not it worked, and whether
you noticed anything strange happening at any time during the process. If you
encounter error dialogs at any time, report exactly what they say.
■ Be nice. The last thing you want to do is insult an expert's favorite program, since
they're less likely to help you at that point. When you're in trouble, it doesn't help to
alienate anyone.
MacTCP Q & A
Before anything else, let me emphasize that you may need to reinstall a clean copy of
MacTCP at various times to solve problems. Thus, you must keep a clean copy that you
have never opened on a locked floppy. The copy that comes on the disk with this book
qualifies as a clean copy of MacTCP.
At some point you may want to set aside a clean, unused copy of MacTCP to facilitate
reinstallations. To do so, move your existing copies of MacTCP and MacTCP Prep to the
desktop, restart with extensions off, run the ISKM Installer and install just a new copy of
MacTCP. When forced to restart, again keep the extensions off. This ensures that you have a
clean copy of MacTCP in your Control Panels folder. Put that copy of MacTCP on a floppy
as a backup. Then replace your old MacTCP and MacTCP Prep files and restart to return to
your previous state.
Also, let me recommend that if you have FTP access, you get a copy of Peter Lewis's free
MacTCP Watcher. It includes another document on troubleshooting MacTCP connections,
written by Eric Behr. It's in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Anyway, on to the questions and answers about MacTCP!
Q: I don't see an icon for InterSLIP or PPP in my MacTCP control panel.
A: Install InterSLIP or PPP in your Extensions folder, and try again.
Q: I get a weird -23004 error from MacTCP, and it complains about its drivers not being
installed.
A: Make sure that you select InterSLIP or PPP and not LocalTalk in the MacTCP control
panel.
Q: What about that weird slider bar in the upper right of the MacTCP configuration
dialog?
A: Ignore it unless you're on a subnet, which means you'll have a network administra-
tor who can tell you what to do there.
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection
369
Q: Should I type anything in the IP number box in the MacTCP control panel if Vm
using Server addressing?
A: No. Only enter a number there if you use a Manually-addressed account.
Q: Why can't I type anything in the Gateway box in the MacTCP configuration dialog
when I'm using Server addressing?
A: Your gateway address is determined by your server when you use Server address-
ing, which is why you can't type in there. InterSLIP fills it in for MacTCP, but it
makes no real difference.
However, one reader found that in using VersaTerm SLIP, the first time you log in
you must enter a Gateway address and your IP address into VersaTerm SLIP, via
either the fields in the upper right of the configuration window or a small pop-up
menu in VersaTerm AdminSLIP's terminal window. With Northwest Nexus, the
Gateway address in this case is the first of the two IP numbers that the machine
provides after you enter your login name and password, something like
198.137.231.150. Your IP address for that session is the second of the two
numbers. Other providers may be similar.
Q: What are the MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep files?
A: MacTCP creates them when you restart, to store various settings and preferences.
You can throw them out at any time with impunity, since MacTCP recreates them
with the same settings when you restart. Note that you must restart after throwing
them out since MacTCP applications require MacTCP DNR to work properly.
If you reinstall MacTCP without throwing out these files, MacTCP retains the
settings it had before you reinstalled. This can be useful for moving copies of
MacTCP around, but they also tend to retain any corruption.
Q: My Mac crashed the first time I restarted after reinstalling MacTCP. Should I be ^ Trouble-
worried, even though it doesn't crash now? ^ sWingVour
® ^ Connection
A: I would completely reinstall MacTCP (throwing out MacTCP DNR and MacTCP
Prep as well) and reconfigure to be safe, but I don't think you should worry too
much. Anti-virus software like SAM can sometimes get persnickety about MacTCP
creating the MacTCP DNR file, and I could see that perhaps causing the problem.
In fact, I hear that if the MacTCP DNR files become corrupted, some anti-virus
software, such as Gatekeeper, could possibly prev^ent MacTCP from updating it,
which is a bad thing. If you use sensitive anti-virus softw^are that tries to prevent
unknown actions (Disinfectant is fine), to be very^ sure it isn't causing problems, turn
it off, delete MacTCP, MacTCP DNR, and MacTCP Prep, reinstall a clean copy of
MacTCP, restart, turn the anti-virus software back on, and restart again.
Q; Hmm, I don't seem to have a MacTCP DNR file. Why not?
A: That's really weird, but one reader reported a reproducible conflict with a control
panel from Apple called CPU Energy Saver. Try removing it and restarting. MacTCP
should create a new MacTCP DNR file on restart if it's not present.
370 Internei Starter Kit for Macintosh
Q: I also don't have a MacTCP Prep file.
A: First, try opening MacTCP, changing something and then closing it. That should
force the creation of a MacTCP Prep file in the Preferences folder. If that doesn't
work, restart without extensions, particularly anti-virus programs, and try
reconfiguring MacTCP again.
Q: I crashed while using Fetch or some other MacTCP-based program. Should 1 rein-
stall MacTCP?
A: Possibly. First, connect again to see if Fetch works. If it does, you're fine. If it doesn't,
throw out the MacTCP DNR file and restart. Try Fetch again. If it still doesn't work,
completely reinstall MacTCP from scratch. This isn't usually necessary, luckily.
After a truly nasty crash, you may find it necessary to reinstall InterSLIP or MacPPP
as well. If you use InterSLIP, remove your modem configuration file from the
InterSLIP folder before reinstalling InterSLIP, because it's worth trying with your
old configuration file before you toast it as well.
Q: I'm getting the impression that reinstalling MacTCP is a common occurrence. Is that
true?
A: Yes and no. I seldom do it, but frankly, if anything goes wrong, reinstalling MacTCP
is worth trying. Make sure to throw out MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep, too, since
they can harbor the corruption that caused MacTCP to have problems in the first
place. Always keep a copy of MacTCP on a locked floppy disk, to facilitate reinstal-
lation.
Q: I'm running MacTCP 2.0.2 or 2.0.4. Should I update to 2.0.6?
A: Sure, why not? I personally haven't seen any problems in 2.0.2 or 2.0.4 that were
fixed in 2.0.6, but others have, and it's a free update that's stored on:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mactcp- 206 -updt.hqx
Besides, MacTCP 2.0.6 is on the disk that comes with this book, so you can install it
from there if you want, first removing the old MacTCP, MacTCP DNR, and MacTCP
Prep.
Q: When I went to update my copy of MacTCP to 2.0.6, 1 got some sort of error about a
DRVR 22. What's that all about?
A: The MacTCP updater only works on a clean copy of MacTCP that has never been
opened before. Get a new copy from your master disk, update it, and the updater
will work fine. Then, keep a clean copy of 2.0.6 on a locked floppy somewhere for
use when reinstalling.
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 371
Domain Name Server Errors
I've noticed many people running into a problem where SLIP or PPP (any implementa-
tion) connects properly, but trouble arises with the domain name server when they
attempt to run any of the other MacTCP programs. Sometimes they crash or hang, but the
behavior is usually completely reproducible (altliough we have seen the occasional
exception, where it will work fine once after reinstalling MacTCP but fail on subsequent
connections). This problem occurs primarily in Server-addressed situations, but I've heard
sporadic reports from people using Manually-addressed accounts.
1 haven't absolutely solved this problem yet. I'm sorry to say, but here are some things to
try. I find that the easiest way to test this situation is with Peter Lewis's free MacTCP
Watcher, which shows an IP number but no Mac name in this instance. It also complains
about a "No answer error" or a "Cache fault error" when it is unable to find the domain
name server. If you use Fetch, you can tell quickly that you are seeing the problem if
when you connect, the dog cursor is frozen. If the dog cursor runs, you're generally better
off. If the cursor is frozen, immediately hit command-period to try canceling the connec-
tion before Fetch hangs. NCSA Telnet can prove useful as well, since in some cases you
may be able to telnet to a machine by using its IP number, but using the domain name
fails. This indicates that the connection works, but that there is a problem resolving
domain names.
Note that the problem is generally not with your account. Each time someone has had this
problem and asked me to check their account, it has worked fine if they did indeed have a
SLIP or PPP account, although tr}dng to connect via SLIP or PPP to a shell account can
cause the problem. That said, here are some things to tr)', in this order:
■ Disconnect, restart, and reconnect. Sometimes that's all it takes.
■ Throw out your MacTCP DNR file, and restart. Sometimes this file becomes cor-
rupted, and MacTCP will create a new one on restart if necessary.
■ Check your domain name server configuration in MacTCP carefully to make sure
you typed the correct IP numbers. I've made this mistake before.
■ If you are using a Manually-addressed account, make sure you have typed the
correct number into the Gateway address box in MacTCP's configuration dialog.
Only your provider can tell you what your Gateway address is — you cannot
guess it.
■ If you use InterSLIP, make sure you're using the appropriate gateway script for your
provider. Without this, your Mac may be unable to get an IP number properly. A
number of people tr)^ to use the Simple UNIX /Telebit script that's built into
InterSLIP when they should use a custom gateway script. The Simple UNIX /Telebit
script simply won't work with a Server-addressed account like those that Northwest
Nexus provides. This is because gateway scripts for providers like Northwest Nexus
Trouble-
shooting Your
Connection
372 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
are designed to find your IP number from the login message each time you login. If
you use the Simple UNIX /Telebit script instead, it completes successfully after
sending your userid and password, and ignores the IP address that appears next.
■ Login with a terminal emulator just to make sure your account is set up for SLIP or
PPP. If after providing your user name and password and send any necessary
commands to start SLIP or PPP (ask your provider if any are necessary), you don't
see garbage or something like "SL/IP session beginning..." and you get to a Unix
prompt, then your account has not been set up for SLIP or PPP. Ask your provider
to fix it. This is a common mistake for overworked providers.
■ If for some reason you are using InterSLIP 1.0fc3, use version 1.0.1 (or later) since
that version solved various problems like this. It's on the ISKM disk.
■ Reinstall MacTCP from scratch. Hey, it's easy, but you'd be surprised how much it
helps.
■ Make sure your domain name server information in the MacTCP configuration
dialog looks something like this (it will be different for your domain if you don't use
Northwest Nexus):
halcyon.com. 198.137.231.1 (•)
198.137.231.1
192.135.191.1
■ Try turning off Virtual Memory, if you're using it, or disabling RAM Doubler, if
you're using that. One person reported success without Virtual Memory enabled.
■ Ask your provider if other people are experiencing this problem as well, since it may
in fact be related to an overloaded domain name server. They may be able to use a
different machine for DNS services and solve the problem that way.
■ Try using a different telephone cord to the modem. In one case, a slightly bad
telephone cord caused some line noise that messed up InterSLIP in such a way as to
cause this error.
■ Okay, here's a major realization that we've made (thanks to Michael Tardiff for
tremendous help in figuring this out). If nothing so far has worked, check to make
absolutely sure that you are using hardware handshaking with your modem, and
more importantly, make sure XON/XOFF is turned off. It seems that if XON/XOFF
is turned on, the SLIP or PPP program may appear to log in properly, but will fail to
find the Gateway address properly.
Server-addressed accounts determine the Gateway address at connect time, which is
why you cannot type it into MacTCP. Nonetheless, if, in InterSLIP (and MacPPP, we
think) you don't properly use hardware handshaking, then some sort of initial
negotiation that determines the Gateway address fails. When that happens, a
necessary line of communication with the host is broken. The upshot of this is that
MacTCP Watcher will find no Mac name for your Mac. That Mac name should be
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 373
supplied by reverse name mapping, but it seems that if that initial negotiation after
the login process fails, the Mac receives no Mac name from the host via the gateway.
Using exactly the same settings otherwise, we showed that merely toggling a
modem setting that turned hardware handshaking on and off could make the
difference between a successful connection and a failed one.
■ Make sure that your modem cable is indeed a hardware handshaking cable. Most
high-speed modems purchased in ''Macintosh kits" within the last few years include
proper hardware handshaking cables, but if you bought a modem without a cable,
or you bought a new cable separately from a computer store, your cable may not be
a proper hardware handshaking cable. You may need to call your modem vendor to
confirm this. Modern hardware handshaking cables should have the pinouts shown
in Table 20.1. You can test this if you have the proper electronic testing equipment,
or you can construct an electric testing device that turns on a light or makes a noise
when a circuit is closed by touching leads to the proper pins (I once used an empty
battery-powered squirt gun to indicate when a circuit was completed).
Table 20.1
Hardware Handshaking Cable Pin-out
Mac Function
RS-232 Function
Mac Pin
DB-25 Pin
RxD (receive)
Receive Data
5
3
TxD (transmit)
Transmit Data
3
2
Ground
Ground
4&8
7
HSKi
CTS
2
5
Trouble-
HSKo
RTS & DTR
1
4&20
3. shooting Your
5 Connection
GPi
CD
7
8
<
■ If you do not have a hardware handshaking cable, you can purchase them from
numerous sources, but insist on a hardware handshaking cable, not just a modem
cable. Jump up and down, yell, and scream, if necessary, but the two terms are not
necessarily interchangeable. I've ordered high-quality, properly wired cables for
about $15 from the Celestin Company, 800/835-5514, 360/385-3767, 360/385-3586
(fax), celestin@olympus.net
■ After you determine that your modem cable is indeed a hardware handshaking
cable, next ensure that hardware handshaking is turned on in your SLIP or PPP
program. You may see a checkbox labeled Hardware Handshaking, as in InterSLIP,
or a pop-up menu listing choices such as XON/XOFF, CTS, RTS, and CTS/RTS.
Choose CTS or CTS/RTS for hardware handshaking. There are other terms for the
RS-232 functions that some programs use — if you're confused, ask the program's
tech support folks. Hardware handshaking is usually relatively easy to check and set.
374 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
■ Unfortunately, simply turning on hardware handshaking in your SLIP or PPP
program may not be sufficient. It seems that some modems set XON/XOFF, or
software handshaking, in their default settings. Thus, when you initialize the
modem with the factory default initialization string, you actually turn software
handshaking back on. This is bad. I ran into this with a Telebit QBlazer, which
defaults to software handshaking with the setting S58=3. By changing that to S58=2
in the initialization string, the domain name server errors disappeared immediately
because InterSLIP could then complete the negotiation for the Gateway address and
the reverse name mapping that goes on right after the login process.
VersaTerm AdminSLIP may not always suffer from the same problem as InterSLIP.
Merely setting hardware handshaking in the configuration window enabled the
QBlazer to work, whereas checking the hardware handshaking box in InterSLIP had
made no difference. Nonetheless, consult the fine print in your modem's manual for
the settings to ensure that hardware handshaking is enabled. Look for settings called
DTE Flow Control. In Telebit modems, those settings are controlled by the S58
register, although other modems undoubtedly differ.
■ Try using another modem. This worked for one user who switched from a Zoom
2400 bps modem to a QuickTel v.32bis modem. This may well have been related to
the hardware handshaking issue.
■ Try booting from another hard disk, if you have one.
■ Try installing MacTCP and the other software on another Macintosh, if you have
one.
■ Try rebuilding your desktop. I have no idea why this would make a difference, but
it's worth a try. You can rebuild your desktop by holding down the Command and
Option keys during startup until the Macintosh asks you if you want to rebuild the
desktop.
■ Try zapping your PRAM (Parameter RAM — it stores various low level settings). 1
have no idea whether this makes any difference, but anything is worth a try at this
point. To zap your PRAM in System 7, hold down K-Option-P-R while restarting
the Mac. You will lose certain settings such as the time and the mouse speed setting,
but you can reset those later.
■ Try reinstalling your System. First, make sure you have a full set of System disks,
because you must disable the System on the hard drive before installing to ensure a
completely clean install. Then, drag your System file to your desktop and restart
with the Install disk. Install the System and then restart with your hard disk again.
Throw out the System file sitting on your desktop, completely reinstall MacTCP
(throwing out MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep), and MacPPP (throw out PPP
Preferences along with the PPP extension and Config PPP) or InterSLIP (throw out
the entire InterSLIP Folder, the InterSLIP extension, and InterSLIP Setup). If any
updates from Apple exist for the version of the System you use, reinstall them as
well. Then, tiy^ again. At least one MacPPP user solved the problem this way.
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 375
■ Consider switching to the commercial VersaTerm SLIP, MacSLIP, or InterPPP. This
may work because of differences in the ways the programs handle Gateway ad-
dresses for Server-addressed accounts and the way they specify hardware hand-
shaking for different modems.
■ Try a different provider.
■ If none of these suggestions help, I don't know what to say, except that some prob-
lems are never solved. Otherwise, we'd have world peace.
Although its interface can seem a bit confusing, MacPPP is actually quite easy to config-
ure and use. But, there are still some questions.
Q: I want to switch from InterSLIP to MacPPP. What should I watch out for?
A: First, you need a new account. Second, 1 don't recommend leaving the InterSLIP
extension installed at the same time as the PPP extension. Third, reinstall MacTCP
from scratch before trying to connect with MacPPP. Frankly, if everything works
fine with InterSLIP, I don't recommend bothering to switch.
Q: I have an internal modem in my PowerBook, but there's no choice in the Port Name
pop-up menu for Internal Modem. What should I select?
A; Select the Modem port. Non-bus internal modems in some PowerBooks (typically
the 100-series) connect to an internal modem port connector. Bus modems like the
Apple Express Modem and the Global Village PowerPort/ Mercury for tlie
PowerBook 500-series and the PowerBook Duo should be set to Internal Modem.
Q: I have an internal modem in my PowerBook 520, but I want to use an external one
on the Printer-Modem port. Why doesn't that selection show up in the Port Name
pop-up menu?
A: In the PowerBook Setup control panel, there's a setting on how the modem should
be treated. If it's set to Compatible, your Printer-Modem port won't appear in the
Port Name menu. Set the PowerBook Setup control panel's Modem setting to
Normal and all will be well.
Q: Why do I get an error message from MacPPP complaining about having insufficient
memory?
A: It's been suggested that if you installed MacPPP with SAM active, and used the
"allow" feature in SAM, that MacPPP and possibly MacTCP would be corrupted.
The fix is to turn SAM off and reinstall both MacTCP and MacPPP from scratch.
Q: My Open button is grayed out so I can't click on it to connect.
A: The first, and most likely possibility is that you have not selected the PPP icon in the
MacTCP control panel. Make sure it's selected (try selecting another icon in MacTCP
then reselect PPP), and try again.
MacPPP
376 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
There are some known conflicts that might cause this. One possible conflict might be
with an older version of the shareware SpeedyFinder, although the most recent
versions solve this. Also, the elderly screensaver called Moire has been implicated in
this problem as well. Finally, many Performas came with 2400 bps Global Village
TelePort/ Bronze modems, and if you upgrade to a faster modem, you should move
the Global Village Toolbox file out of the Extensions folder and the GV TelePort
Bronze file out of the Control Panels folder before trying again. And of course, if you
have the SLIP extension from VersaTerm SLIP, InterSLIP, or MacSLIP installed, that
may cause the problem as well.
Also, be very wary of any fax or remote control software that may have taken over
the modem. Even if it doesn't conflict directly with MacTCP or MacPPP, the fax
software may leave the modem in such a state that MacPPP is unable to access it.
Q: My Open button is still grayed out.
A: Reinstall MacTCP from scratch, making sure to delete MacTCP DNR and MacTCP
Prep. This one once threw me for an hour.
Q: I still can't click on the Open button.
A: Okay, one last possibility. Trj' reinstalling your System from scratch. Reinstalling the
System seemed to help a number of users (mostly using Macintosh Performas) with
this problem. First, make sure you have a full set of System disks, since you must
disable the System on the hard drive before installing, to ensure a completely clean
install. Then, drag your System file to your desktop, and restart with the Install disk.
Install a new System, and then restart with your hard disk again. If any updates
from Apple exist for the version of the System you use, reinstall them as well. Throw
out the System file sitting on your desktop, then completely reinstall MacTCP
(throwing out MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep as well) and MacPPP (throw out the
PPP extension and the Config PPP control panel), and try again.
Q: When I click on the Open button, MacPPP never even dials out, but times out
waiting for OK during the checking for modem phase. Do I have a bad modem init
string?
A: This timeout is independent of the modem initialization string, since MacPPP isn't
even getting that far. The problem is probably related to the flow control or port
speed settings. Try different settings, and make sure you don't select 14,400 or 28,800
for the port speed, since some modems can't handle those as port speeds.
Also, it's possible that you have a bad modem cable, although you would probably
have noticed that before.
Q: Nice try, but I still can't get MacPPP to recognize my internal Supra modem.
A: Ah, that's different. Larry Blunk mentioned a problem with the Supra and perhaps
some other internal PowerBook modems. It seems that they are normally in a low-
power state and can take a few seconds to warm up when MacPPP opens the serial
driver and tries to dial out. Because the modem is warming up, it ignores the first
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 377
initialization string that MacPPP sends, and MacPPP doesn't currently try again. The
workarounds include using the terminal window or trying to script the modem
initialization string in the Connect Script dialog. Larry says he's fixed this in an as-
yet-unreleased version of MacPPP.
Q: Why can't I type into the terminal window?
A: In some cases, the terminal window doesn't display the characters you type (this
may be related to local echo settings in the modem initialization string) until you
press the Return key. Typing blind is a pain, but you shouldn't have to use the
terminal window much.
Q: For some reason, I can't connect using port speeds over 19,200 bps? Why would
that be?
A: Some modems don't work well at speeds over 19,200 with their default configura-
tions. You may need to twiddle with the modem initialization string to get them to
work. Don't worry about it too much though, since 19,200 bps is fast enough for a
14,400 bps modem.
Also, activating the FAXstf 3.0 LineManager option, according to one reader,
prevents MacPPP from working with the SupraFAXmodem v.32bis at speeds above
19,200. In general, distrust fax software.
Q: Why can't I connect using 14,400 bps with my 14,400 bps modem or at 28,800 bps
with my 28,800 bps modem?
A: You're confusing modem speed and port speed. The port speed setting in MacPPP
should always be set faster than the modem speed to take advantage of modem
compression capabilities. Some modems don't recognize 14,400 or 28,800 bps as
valid port speeds and won't work at all.
Q: My modem will connect, and MacPPP will get to the Establishment phase, and then Trouble-
the Mac crashes. What could be happening? (I can use the terminal window to login ^ slwotmg Your
, rr o \ ^ Connection
fine.)
A: One reader reported a problem like this. It seems that the remote system sent a
"banner page" of all sorts of text after accepting the password, but before starting
PPP. MacPPP saw the banner page and got confused, because it was expecting PPP
code at that point. The solution is to send several \d delay tags after sending the
password; that gives MacPPP some time to ignore the banner page before starting
PPP.
Q: My modem will connect, and MacPPP will get to the Establishment phase, and then
I get a Link Dead message. Why?
A: The most likely reason is that something in the login chat script is wrong. You may
have entered the wrong userid or password, or entered them incorrectly. It's also not
uncommon for a provider to make a mistake in setting up an account such that it's
not a PPP account, or perhaps such that it links to a different userid or password.
378 luteniet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Also, see the previous question and answer, since sometimes the problem above
doesn't result in a crash, but merely a Link Dead message.
Finally, some providers give different userids and passwords for dialing in than
they do for email, say, or different userids and passwords for shell accounts versus
PPP accounts. Double check to make sure you're using the correct ones.
Q: Sometimes when I'm trying to connect and MacPPP has to redial, I get a failure
dialog with a Retry button. What should I do?
A: Click on it. I'm not positive of the circumstances in which this dialog appears, but I
always just click Retry and eventually it connects.
Q: I use a Global Village PowerPort with my PowerBook 500-series Mac, and although
it works fine the first time I dial out in any session, on subsequent tries it doesn't
seem to be working. It won't show the menu status information, nor will it make any
sounds. What's wrong?
A: This appears to be a problem exclusive to the PowerPort modems in the PowerBook
500-series. The problem lies in the Global Village software, and is actually only
cosmetic, although it's easy to get impatient and assume it's not working. Check for
a later version of the Global Village software in:
ftp://ftp.globalvillag.com/pub/softv/are/
Q: MacPPP seems to redial the phone randomly on its own.
A: Click the Hard Close button, rather than the Soft Close button, to disconnect. The
drawback to doing this is that you cannot use MacPPP's auto connect feature after
this unless you restart. Also, set a short idle timeout in Config PPP so it hangs up
relatively quickly if MacPPP does dial on its own.
Make sure you don't have any MacTCP-based applications or control panels (like
Network Time) set to launch during startup. They'll force MacPPP to dial out every
time.
Q: I can connect properly, but I experience very slow transfer rates in Anarchie and
Fetch. It seems okay at first, but gets progressively worse until the connection is
basically dead.
A: First, if you hav^e the port speed set to 57,600 bps, try setting it down to 38,400 bps or
19,200 bps, especially if you're using a slower Macintosh with a fast modem.
Second, I've seen this happen with MacPPP and with MacSLIP, but in both cases, I
was able to solve the problem by turning off all unnecessary extensions and control
panels. The hard part, then, was isolating which of them were actually causing the
problem, and in some cases, more than one did. On my parents' LC II running
MacSLIP, the APS PowerTools CD driver software turned out to be the culprit. On
my PowerBook 100 (this was an embarrassing problem that haunted me for
months), the problem was caused by PBTools 2.0, a PowerBook utility. Another user
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 379
reported problems with SuperClock and the Spirit CD control panel. In general, Td
look for any control panel or extension that is in constant use, like a clock, a battery-
monitoring utility, or a CD driver control panel (two others of which, the MindLink
CD driver and the Apple CD driver, have been implicated in other performance
problems as well).
Q: Any idea why MacPPP crashes when I click on the Hard Close button?
A: No, but one reader who was experiencing this tracked it down to a conflict with
SAM, the anti-virus program. If you're running SAM or any other anti-virus soft-
ware, try removing it first. Then, if that doesn't work, try shutting off all unneces-
sary extensions and control panels and see if that makes a difference. If it does, work
your way back up to a full set and see which file is the culprit. 1 personally use and
recommend only Disinfectant for anti-virus purposes.
InterSLIP Q & A
Since its introduction in 1993, InterSLIP has become popular for its combination of
flexibility, utility, and price — it's free. However, InterSLIP isn't always trouble-free.
Following are some of the more common questions and answers relating to InterSLIP.
Q: I can't find InterSLIP Control on my disk.
A: You don't need InterSLIP Control if you use System 7. It is necessary only with
System 6.
Q: I copied the gateway and dialing scripts into the proper folders. Why don't they
show up in the pop-up menus in InterSLIP?
A: Two things to check here. Those files should be text files, so if they are any other
type, they may not show up, since InterSLIP won't recognize them. If you simply
save from Microsoft Word, for instance, those files will be of type WDBN and not of
type TEXT. Use Save As and select the Text Only option that exists in most word
processors. Second, if you copy those scripts in while InterSLIP is running, it won't
recognize them until you quit and launch InterSLIP Setup again. You don't have to
restart; simply quit and relaunch.
Q: If I launch an application without manually connecting with InterSLIP, InterSLIP
tries to dial the phone twice, then the Mac hangs. What's going on?
A: In my experience, InterSLIP's auto connect feature doesn't work very well. This may
not be InterSLIP's fault, and it does work for some people, so if it does for you, great.
If not, make a habit of connecting manually before you launch a MacTCP program
such as Fetch. Since Eudora doesn't open MacTCP until you check for mail, you can
use it without connecting InterSLIP first. One person said that he had solved his
auto connect problems by adding a "pause 30" statement in his Gateway script just
before it exits. This may help, although my Mac never even dials the phone before
freezing on auto connect.
Trouble-
s' shooting Your
^ Connection
380 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Q: When I click the Connect button, nothing happens. Why not?
A: This points directly at an extension conflict with either InterSLIP or MacTCP. I
would recommend pulling all unnecessary extensions and control panels out. Or,
better yet, use an extension manager such as Apple's free Extension Manager, or the
powerful (but commercial) Conflict Catcher from Casady & Greene, which can
actually help in your testing process. Leave only MacTCP and InterSLIP, and try
again. If the problem disappears, slowly replace the extensions and control panels
that you use until the problem reappears, identifying tlie culprit in the process.
We've seen problems possibly related to MacTOPS, DOS Mounter, SuperLaserSpool,
and GlobalFax, and a two-way conflict with AutoRemounter and PSI FaxMonitor. In
general, be very wary of any extensions that modify a network or a modem, includ-
ing fax or remote control software. I'm also generally suspicious of anti-virus
software. Even if these programs don't specifically conflict with InterSLIP or
MacTCP, they may leave the modem in such a state that InterSLIP cannot dial out
properly.
Q: I removed all of my extensions and control panels and I still get nothing when I click
the Connect button.
A: Try reinstalling MacTCP from scratch (throwing out MacTCP DNR and MacTCP
Prep) and InterSLIP (throw out the entire InterSLIP Folder, the InterSLIP extension,
and InterSLIP Setup), and reinstall from fresh copies. If you have custom scripts,
there's no need to throw them out.
Q: It still doesn't work.
A: Shoot. The next thing to try is reinstalling your System. First, make sure you have a
full set of System disks, since you must disable the System on the hard drive before
installing, to ensure a completely clean install. Then, drag your System file to your
desktop, and restart with the Install disk. Install a new System, and then restart with
your hard disk again. If any updates from Apple exist for the version of the System
you use, reinstall them as well. Throw out the System file sitting on your desktop,
then completely reinstall MacTCP (throwing out MacTCP DNR and MacTCP Prep)
and InterSLIP (throw out the entire InterSLIP Folder, the InterSLIP extension, and
InterSLIP Setup), and try again.
Q: Sorry to be a pain, but it still doesn't do anything when I click the Connect button.
A: Okay, I don't really know what's happening here. Try getting a PPP account and use
MacPPP, or purchase VersaTerm SLIP or MacSLIP and see if they work any better. I
wish I could give a better answer, but I can't.
Q: My modem doesn't seem to work with the Hayes-Compatible Modem script.
A: You need a dialing script, which is similar to an ARA script. For starters, I recom-
mend the Minimal Dialing Script I provide on the disk. It works with most modems
if you enter the proper modem initialization string.
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 381
Q: I'm using a dialing script, and when I click Connect, it says Dialing, but I don't hear
the modem dial or see it do anything else.
A: I've seen this happen a few times. I suspect the script is in some way incorrect —
perhaps the error correction and data compression have been turned on improperly.
Try the Hayes-Compatible Modem script. If that doesn't work, try the Minimal
Dialing Script on the disk. If that doesn't work, ask your modem company for a
good ARA script that you can modify (in theory, an ARA script should work
without modification, but is best when modified). If that fails, beg for help from
others with the same modem on the nets, preferably in comp . sy s . mac - comm or the
Apple Internet Users mailing list (see the "Reporting Problems" section earlier in
this chapter for subscription information).
Q: The modem seems to connect, then hang up. What's going on?
A: The most likely reason is that something in the login chat script is wrong. You may
have entered the wrong userid or password, or entered them incorrectly. It's also not
uncommon for a provider to make a mistake in setting up an account such that it's
not a SLIP account, or perhaps such that it links to a different userid or password.
Also, some providers give different userids and passwords for dialing in than they
do for email, say, or different userids and passwords for shell accounts versus SLIP
accounts. Double check to make sure you're using the ones.
Finally, use a terminal emulator to walk through the login process manually.
Sometimes, the provider's system is experiencing a high load and doesn't respond to
your gateway script quickly enough. If this might be the case, try increasing the
numbers in the statements that serve as timeout values.
Q: I can connect on occasion, but not all the time. What could be wrong?
A: Some modems, the US Robotics Sportster and the Global Village TelePort/Gold in
particular, sometimes have problems if you are using an incorrect modem initializa-
tion string. Check your string carefully.
Also, I've noticed that sometimes I'll see failed connections on my Northwest Nexus
account. They range from receiving tons of data when InterSLIP says "Waiting for
prompt," to nothing at all happening when InterSLIP says "Waiting for prompt,"
"Sending username," or "Sending password." I've even had InterSLIP report "Login
incorrect" when I know full well it was fine. Just try again a few times, waiting a bit
between tries, if you can. I suspect these problems are related to a bad modem, line
noise, or some other situation out of your control, and in my experience they always
go away after several tries.
Again, check to see if the timeout values in your gateway script might be too short.
If the script times out before you get in on some occasions, it could cause this
frustrating inconsistency.
Finally, some people have suggested renaming the Global Village extensions used
by Global Village modems so they load after MacTCP. It's worth a try if you have
one of those modems.
Trouble-
shooting Your
Connection
382 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Q: InterSLIP connects fine, but none of the programs seem to quite work, although they
try to connect.
A: Try toggling your TCP Header Compression checkbox (also sometimes known as
CSLIP). If that checkbox doesn't match the setting for your account, things will fail.
Essentially what happens is that small tasks such as looking up a machine name
succeed, but anything else fails.
Q: InterSLIP connects fine, but I can't transfer files or messages of any size without the
Mac hanging. Why not?
A: It could be related to your modem init string's settings for flow control, so check that
carefully. Make sure you're using the proper MTU size in InterSLIP. Also, try
turning off all unnecessary extensions, using an extension manager or by simply
dragging them from the Extensions and Control Panels folder to "Extensions
(disabled)" and "Control Panels (disabled)" folders. As a last resort, try InterSLIP
1.0.2d2 (or later) if you're using 1.0.1.
If you use the Apple Express Modem or a GeoPort Telecom Adapter, also make sure
to try the latest Express Modem software, available at this or another Apple FTP site:
ftp : / /mirror . info . apple . com/Apple . Support .Area/ Apple . Software . Updates /US/Macintosh/
Networking . and . Communications /Other . N&C . Software /
Q: I had InterSLIP working, but now that I've moved my hard drive to another ma-
chine, it crashes whenever I launch InterSLIP Setup.
A: Delete your InterSLIP Prefs file. For some reason, possibly related to the location of
the InterSLIP Setup window, this has happened on several machines we've seen.
Q: InterSLIP works fine, except that when I click the Disconnect button, my modem
doesn't hang up. What can I do?
A: First off, if you use a dialing script other than the built-in Hayes-Compatible Modem
script, it usually will have an ©hangup section. My Minimal Dialing Script has one,
and will hang up the modem just fine if you use it instead of the Hayes-Compatible
Modem script.
Some people recommend adding &D2 to the end of your modem initialization
string. Doing so will hang up the modem if DTR goes low, which it does when you
click the Disconnect button. Unfortunately, DTR can also go low if you have a fast
modem and a slow Mac and the modem transfers more data than the Mac can
handle at that point. Using a port speed of 38,400 bps or 57,600 bps with a 14,400 bps
modem can exacerbate this problem. If you run into this problem, you'll see random
hang-ups while downloading large files. If you do use &D2, you may be able to set
an S-register (S25 in at least some modems) in the modem init string that lengthens
the time DTR can be low before the modem realizes it, thus preventing the hangups.
Only worry about this if you like reading modem manuals. Overall, the Minimal
Dialing Script is a better solution.
Chapter 20 ♦ Troubleshooting Your Connection 383
Book 'Em, Danno
It's been fun. I'm sure. We've tracked down and locked up tons of problems, and I hope
that any culprit that's been harassing you is among them. Perhaps the most important
thing to do when troubleshooting is to remain calm and proceed methodically. If you do
that, you're well on your way to finding and eliminating the problem.
Actually, the real fun comes in the next few chapters, where I talk about all of the pro-
grams that rely on the connection that you've established with MacTCP and either
MacPPP or InterSLIP.
U Trouble-
3. shooting Your
Connection
Chapter
Email
Considering that email is the ubiquitous application on the Internet, you should use the
best email program available; otherwise, you will slowly (or quickly, in my case) go stark
raving mad. I've looked at many email programs in my time, and although a number of
them are becoming more and more impressive, none compete with Steve Corner's
Eudora. Simply put, Eudora does most everything right. Again, I don't want to imply that
other programs aren't good, but none I've seen can match the features and capabilities of
Eudora.
Eudora
Steve Domer first wrote Eudora while working at the University of Illinois. Because of its
academic heritage, Eudora was made freely available on the Internet. Because of its clean
interface and full feature set, Eudora rapidly became the Internet email application of
choice. In July of 1992, Steve left the University of Illinois and went to work for a com-
pany called Qualcomm, where he continued to enhance Eudora. Because Steve and
Qualcomm wanted to give something back to the educational community and taxpayers
who made Eudora possible, and because free software is the best advertising for commer-
cial software, Eudora has remained freeware. Qualcomm also has released a commercial
version of Eudora that adds some nice touches and features that are essential for email
users like me who get a ton of mail every day.
Note Note Note
386 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
I
To answer the question that almost everyone always asks, Steve named his Post Office
Protocol program "Eudora, " a fter Eudora Welty, the author of a short story he had read,
called "Why I Live at the P,0. "
The freeware version will continue to exist and will be developed in conjunction with the
commercial version, but it is unlikely to receive many new features, other than those Steve
deems necessary for basic email usage. For example, he added support for MIME (Multi-
purpose Internet Mail Extensions), an Internet standard for transferring non-textual data
via email, and support for Apple events, so that Eudora can work more closely with other
programs on the Macintosh. In addition, the latest versions of both the freeware and
commercial versions now work in Power Mac-native mode, significantly increasing
speed.
The version of Eudora 1.5,1 included on the disk is not the Power Mac-native version
because it was too large to fit on the disk. You can find it in either of the following:
ftp: / /ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/1 .5/eudora151fat .hqx
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/fnail/
The commercial Eudora 2.1 is extremely similar to the freeware Eudora 1.5.1. It looks
about the same, and for the most part, works the same. Perhaps the most apparent
additional feature in Eudora 2.1 is the filtering feature. It lets you annotate the subject of
messages, change their priority, or put them in specific mailboxes based on information in
the headers or the bodies of the messages. You can have as many filters as you want, and
they can apply to incoming, outgoing, or selected messages. In addition, 2.1 also supports
spell checking in messages via the Word Services suite of Apple events. You can even buy
Eudora along with Spellswell, an Apple event-aware spelling program.
Using Eudora to transfer files in email back and forth between Macs and PCs works well if
your recipient either uses PC Eudora or another MIME-compatible mail program. If you're
sending the files from the Mac, use AppleDouble encoding. If you're sending from PC
Eudora, choose MIME before attaching the file. Both versions of Eudora automatically
recognize MIME attachments and decode them automatically upon receipt.
Other useful features that exist only in Eudora 2.1 include uuencode support, automatic
opening of attachments encoded in MIME, BinHex, or uuencode, multiple nickname files
for organizations, support for System 7 drag and drop for attaching files to outgoing
messages, stationery for frequently sent messages, menu-sharing for Frontier users, and
multiple signatures. In my opinion, if you use Eudora heavily, as I do, Eudora 2.1 offers
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 387
an extremely attractive set of features above and beyond the basic set in Eudora 1.5.1. For
those just starting out, try Eudora 1.5.1 for a while, and if you decide you like it, consider
purchasing the full Eudora 2.1 version for $65 (there's a coupon for it hiding somewhere
in the back of the book). I can't recommend the commercial version of Eudora highly
enough. And frankly, 1 encourage people to buy it, sending the message to Qualcomm
that the community appreciates free software and is willing to support commercial
versions to keep free versions available. However, for the following discussion. I'll
concentrate primarily on 1.5.1 because that's the version on the disk.
Installation and Setup
Although powerful and flexible, Eudora has a surprisingly simple setup. First, from the
Special menu, choose Settings (see figure 21.1).
Personal Information
Checking Mail
Settings
Getting Started
TOP Account:
[B
Re al Name:
|AdemC. Engst
Connection Method:
(8) MacTCP
O Communications Toolbox
□ Offline (nocoinections)
[ Cancel 1 (( )l l
Figure 21.1 Eudora Settings dialog.
The scrolling list on the left-hand side of the dialog provides access to a large number of
Eudora's settings. Optional plug-ins available on various FTP sites can add even more
options (see the following for some pointers). Despite all the available fields, only the two
in the Getting Started panel are absolutely necessary (although some Internet providers
may require some additional settings). The POP Account field holds the full address of
your POP account. The best source to find out what to put here is your system adminis-
trator. The next field. Real Name, should be obvious. Lastly, click the MacTCP button
located below the Real Name field.
For most people, that's all there is to the setup process. If you want to enter a different
return address from the address of your POP account (my return address is
ace@tidbits . com, whereas my POP account is ace@king - tidbits . com), click the
second icon in the list. Personal Information, to bring up that panel.
ParHV
Note
388 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If you fill in the Return Address field, be very careful to get it right; otherwise, all your
incoming email will go to an incorrect address and you'll never knotu it. Many people mess
up their configurations by slavishly copying the screen shots in this book— I know because I
get replies to their messages since they use my return address!
If you need to tell Eudora that your SMTP server is on a different machine from your POP
account (it usually isn't), click the third icon in the list. Hosts, to bring up the Host Set-
tings panel. Once you've entered the names of your various servers as given to you by
your Internet provider, scroll down to see the icons that enable you to modify how
Eudora works, such as Checking Mail, Sending Mail, Attachments, and Fonts & Display
(see figure 21.2).
^ Settings L
Checking Mell
POP Account:
=E3
Check for mall every | | mlnulee.
S#ndtng M*fl
QSktp big meeeeges.
ac
AtUohmvnts
A
Fonts & OispUg
□ Leave mell on server
g] Send on check.
^ Save passvord.
Authentication Style:
(•) Passwords Q APOP
[ Cancel ]GD
Figure 21.2 More Eudora Settings.
These options enable you to configure Eudora quickly and easily in order to handle many
different situations. When I'm traveling and connecting via a modem, I generally don't
want to receive large messages, so I turn on the "Skip big messages" checkbox. I also
sometimes use the "Leave mail on server" option to ensure that if something happened to
my PowerBook while I was traveling, I wouldn't lose any of the mail I'd received while
away. I seldom have Eudora check mail regularly, but that's because I get so much that it
would be a constant distraction — however, many people appreciate knowing when new
mail has arrived.
Eudora has so many settings that I don't want to get into showing them all to you, and its
balloon help is among the best I've used. However, the other important options that I
always use are in the Sending Mail panel: Send on check. Word wrap. Fix curly quotes.
Note Note
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 389
Keep copies of outgoing mail, and Use signature. In the Attachments panel, stick with
BinHex encoding for most files you send to otlier Mac users and you'll be fine. Use
AppleDouble for files you send to PC users whose email programs support MIME
(especially PC Eudora). In the Replying panel, I recommend that you use the Reply to all
when Option key is down setting, rather than Reply to all by default. The problem is that
it's not difficult to send something personal to a mailing list or to unintended recipients if
you normally use Reply to all.
One trick (that's not an option) is that if you select text in the message you're replying to
and then hold down Shift while you choose Reply (or press K-Shift-R), Eudora quotes only
the selected text in the reply.
When you've finished browsing through all of Eudora's many settings and have config-
ured the program to your tastes, click the OK button to save your changes. Eudora stores
all of its settings in the Eudora Settings file that it creates in the Eudora Folder in your
System Folder (or in the settings file that you used to open Eudora, if you've created more
than one settings file).
J alluded to creating more than one Eudora Settings file. You can do this by making a copy of
the Eudora Settings file in your System Folder, renaming it, and double-clicking it to launch
Eudora. Then, any changes you make to the settings apply only to that Eudora Settings file.
It's a good way to easily check two email accounts. Also, if you put a copy of the Eudora
Settings file in a new folder and double-click it to launch Eudora, Eudora creates a new set of
mailboxes for you. This can be handy iftzoo people share the same Mac but have different
email accounts and want to keep their email separate.
Commands for accessing three of Eudora's features — Mailboxes, Nicknames, and Signa-
ture — live in the Windows menu. The Mailboxes window enables you to create, rename,
move, and maintain your mailboxes (remember that you can have hierarchical mailboxes
for organizing the email you receive — the mailboxes in figure 21.3 with triangles to the
right of their names are hierarchical). The Nickname window enables you to create,
modify, and remove nicknames, which enable you to avoid memorizing email addresses.
Clicking just to the left of the name adds or removes a bullet; this means the name will
appear as a recipient in Eudora's hierarchical New Message To, Reply To, Forward To,
and Redirect To menus. You can put multiple addresses in a single nickname to create a
small distribution list. Finally, Eudora's Signature window is a simple text window in
which you can enter a signature to be appended to all of your outgoing messages.
Part IV
390 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
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Figure 21.3 Eudora Mailboxes, Nicknames, and Signature windows.
Basic Usage
You're most likely to use Eudora for simple tasks such as creating new messages, reading
incoming mail, replying to messages, and the like. Creating a message is the first thing to
do. From the Message menu, choose New Message, or — to use the shortcut — press K-N
(see figure 21.4).
tldblts®halcyon.com. Hoid 'bout that ujeather?
✓El ✓§= ✓-♦1 ✓□] ✓JH (Queue
To : t 1 db i tsSha 1 cgon . con
From: oce9tidbils.com (Rdon C. Engst)
Subject: How 'bout that weather?
Cc:
Bcc:
Rttachments;
ill]
Vou know you're real ig hard up when you're making small talk with
yourse 1 f .
cheers . . . -‘Rdom
if:
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Figure 21.4 Eudora New Mail zvmdow.
Chapter 21 ^ Email 391
Eudora opens a new window with three parts. At the top of the window is a row of
switch icons, so that you can toggle items such as signatures on a per message basis (point
at them ail with balloon help turned on to see what the icons mean). Below that is an area
for the header. At the bottom of the window is the message area. Tabbing takes you from
one header item to another, and finally to the message window.
You can select email addresses in messages or headers and add them to a Recipients
menu (Add as Recipient from the Special menu). The people you add as recipients show
up in a hierarchical New Message To menu under the Message menu. If you select
someone from that hierarchical menu, Eudora opens a new message with the To line
already filled in (the From line is always filled in for you). When you create nicknames for
people (Nicknames from tlie Special menu), you're given the option to add that nickname
to the recipient list for quick access.
Eudora has a good text entry environment and wraps paragraphs as you write and edit
(which is not true of all email programs, so don't laugh). In fact, Eudora can do some neat
things with text, as shown by the commands in the Edit menu (see figure 21.5).
Edit
Undo Typing
mz
Cut
Copy
8§C
Paste
Paste Rs Quotation
§§•
Clear
Select Rll
§§R
UJrap Selection
c^lB
Finish Nickname
§§,
Insert Recipient
►
Find
►
Sort
►
Figure 21.5 Eudora Edit menu.
I especially like the capability to Insert Recipient and Paste as Quotation. I often want to
send an email address to a friend for which I have a recipient defined; it's nice to be able
to just Insert Recipient in the text where I'm typing. Paste as Quotation also is useful
when you're pulling several messages together in one reply.
The only major fault of Eudora's text entry environment is that it doesn't accept more
than approximately 32K of text; if you want to send a message longer than that, you must
Part IV
Note
392 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
attach a text file to the email message. This limitation will disappear in future versions of
Eudora, although perhaps only in the commercial version.
In any event, back at the New Mail window, clicking on the Queue button queues the
message for delivery (this is because I didn't select the Immediate Send checkbox when
configuring Eudora's Sending Mail panel). If you work on a network that's constantly
connected to the Internet, you may want to send all of your mail immediately, at which
point that Queue button changes to Send. Even with my direct connection, I stick to
queuing messages. It's simply less distracting, and I can always send messages manually
if I want.
With the Send on Check switch turned on, I go to the File menu and choose Check Mail.
Eudora connects to my POP server to receive any waiting mail; it then connects to my
SMTP server to send my queued mail.
If Eudora is interrupted while receiving wail, it can sometimes leave your POP mailbox in a
locked state, preventing you from receiving any more mail until it's unlocked. You can fix
this by telnetting to your account and killing a specific process, which sounds bad, but it is
quite easy. It's explained well in the Eudora Q&A stack, available in the URL below. If you
use Northivest Nexus, you can telnet to your account and at the Unix command line, type
pop-lock to solve this problem.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
If you only want to send mail, choose Send Queued Messages, also from the File menu. At
this point Eudora only connects to the SMTP server to send messages and ignores any
messages that might be waiting to come in.
If the In mailbox isn't open already (another preferences switch makes it open when new
mail arrives), open it from the Mailbox menu by choosing In (see figure 21.6).
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Figure 21.6 Eudora In mailbox.
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 393
Eudora's mailboxes, which all look the same, provide a clean display of your mail. A
status and priority column at the left edge of the window displays various characters to
indicate which messages you haven't read, which you have replied to, which you've
forwarded, redirected, and, in your Out mailbox, which have been sent. Some programs
mark deleted messages in this way too, but Eudora instead copies deleted messages to a
Trash mailbox available in the Mailbox menu. The commercial version of Eudora adds a
column for label and uses the Finder labels (use the Labels control panel to change the
colors and names) to mark messages.
The next column is the name of the sender, followed by the time and date, size of the
message in kilobytes, and subject of the message. In the lower left comer of the window is
an indicator that shows the number of messages in the mailbox, amount of disk space that
it takes up, and amount of space that is wasted. You can recover the wasted space by
choosing Compact Mailboxes from the Special menu, although Eudora also does it
automatically after the ratio of wasted space to space on disk gets too high.
Double-clicking on any message opens the message window (see figure 21.7).
mm
1 Tim O'Connor, 10:39 AM, Tech Support for people mho
□
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Subject: Tech Support for people who
General Motors doesn't have a help line for people who don't know hoiu
to dr I ve . I mag I ne If they did ...
HelpLine: “General Motors HelpLIne, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I got In niy cor and closed the door and nothing happened I"
HelpLine: "Did y6u put the key In the Ignition slot and turn it?"
Customer: "What's an Ignition?"
HelpLine: "It's a starter motor that draws current from your battery
and turns over the eng I ne . "
Customer: "Ignition? Motor? Battery? Engine? How come I have to
know all these technical terms just to use my car?"
HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"
Customer: "My cor ran fine for a week and now It won't go anywhere I"
HelpLine: "Is the gas tank empty?"
Customer: "Huh? How do I know?"
HelpLine: "There's a little gauge on the front panel with a needle and
markings from ‘E* to 'F'. Where Is the needle pointing?"
Customer: "It's pointing to 'E' . What does that mean?"
HelpLine: "It means you have to visit a gasoline vendor and purchase
some more gasoline. Vou con install It yourself or pay the
vendor to install It for you."
Customer: "What? I paid $12,000 for this car! Now you tell me that I
have to keep buying more components? I want a car that comes
with everything built In!"
Figure 21.7 Eudora Message window.
The Eudora Message window shows the Subject at the top and a Priority pop-up menu
that you can use to mark messages for your own reference, which is a good way to sort
Part IV
Note
394 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
them. You can select, copy, and find text in the window, but you cannot change it. Again,
my only complaint about the way Eudora handles incoming messages is that it camiot
display more than approximately 32K of text in a window, so it chops longer messages
into two or more pieces, which can be irritating.
Like many other settings in Eudora, you can modify the size at xvhich Eudora splits messages
loith a plug-in. I've created a plug-in specifically so issues ofTidBITS aren't split— to receive
a copy automatically in email, send a message to tidbits • plug - in^tidbits . com.
Luckily, Eudora can save multiple selected messages to a single file, removing the header
information in the process so that thefe's no header garbage in the middle of tlie file.
Simply select all the messages you want concatenated into a single file. Choose Save As
from the File menu, making sure that the Include Headers and Guess Paragraphs (which
wraps lines in paragraphs) checkboxes aren't selected if you want the file exactly as it was
sent to you.
With a message open, you can use the items in the Message menu to Reply, Forward,
Redirect, or Delete the current message. Most of those functions are self-explanatory, but
Redirect is an interesting and useful command. When you forward a message to someone
else via Eudora, your address becomes the Reply-To address. However, if you want the
original sender's address to remain as the Reply-To address, you use Redirect. That way,
when the person you're redirecting to receives the message and replies, the reply goes to
the original sender, not back to you. Eudora adds a tag that indicates that you redirected
the message to the header of the redirected message so the recipient can see what's
happened.
Once you're done reading a message, you generally want to either delete it or file it.
Eudora makes deleting messages easy (the Delete key, K-D, or the Delete option in the
Message menu) because it merely moves them to the Trash mailbox, from which you can
recover them later, if necessary. I leave a lot of mail, sometimes up to 4,000 messages, in
my Trash so I can easily go back and retrieve something afterwards. When I want to really
delete messages from the Trash to recover some space, I sort by date, select the first half of
the messages, and press the Delete key. Since the messages are already in the Trash,
Eudora deletes them right away, and if I've deleted enough messages to create a sufficient
amount of wasted space in the Trash, Eudora compacts it to recover the space. You can set
Eudora to empty the Trash every time you quit if you're not as retentive about old email
as I am.
Filing messages in one of an arbitrary (or at least large) number of hierarchical mailboxes
is also easy. With the message or messages selected, select the destination mailbox from
the Transfer menu. I save a lot of messages for future reference, so I appreciate the ease of
filing messages.
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 395
special Features
Eudora's clever touches abound. If you choose About Eudora from the Apple menu,
Eudora tells you the minimum amount of memory it should have. Should your In, Out,
and Trash mailboxes fill up to the point where Eudora needs more memory, it's good
about warning you ahead of time and suggesting a size that will support the new require-
ments. That's usually my warning to delete messages from the Trash.
Although Apple's Balloon Help is becoming increasingly common, many people never
think to use it in current programs because it's so slow. I strongly recommend that you
turn it on while exploring Eudora, though, because Steve has written excellent help
balloons that seem to explain every nook and cranny of the program.
Steve must have had fun writing Eudora's dialog boxes. Many of them are, shall I say, less
than serious. For instance, I started typing with a mailbox window open in Eudora (I'd
forgotten that I hadn't switched over to Nisus Writer on my second monitor), and Eudora
beeped at me a couple of times and then opened a dialog saying, "Unfortunately, no one
is listening to keystrokes at the moment. You may as well stop typing." I far prefer such
human touches like this to dialogs that say, "Text entry not allowed," or some such terse
phrase.
Eudora can sort mailboxes on status, priority (which you generally set), sender, date, and
subject. This is a helpful feature for anyone who receives a significant amount of email.
Eudora 2.1 makes sorting even easier than in 1.5.1 (in which you must use a menu) by
letting you click on the colunm titles to sort. I find that I use this feature surprisingly
often.
Eudora supports a number of Apple events, and many people have used Frontier and
AppleScript to add functionality to Eudora through scripting. You can peruse some of
those scripts in:
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/scripts/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
If you create multiple settings files, different people can use the same copy of Eudora to
send and receive their personal email. This setup is handy if a number of people all share
the same computer but don't want to share the same email account ("Hey, no poking
about in my email!"). I use this feature as well, because I have multiple accounts, but I
want all my email to end up in the same In mailbox. Eudora's capability to launch using
different settings files is also the secret to how it's used in large universities. Students are
given a POP account and a Eudora Settings file that's configured for them on a floppy
disk. Whenever they use a public Mac hooked to the campus network, they double-click
on their Eudora Settings file, which launches a copy of Eudora over the network (saving
the space on the floppy disk). All of their mail comes down to the floppy disk, which they
can then read on any other Mac that has Eudora on it.
ParllV
396 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Finally, although official technical support only comes with Eudora 2.1, expert Eudora
users provide extremely good support online in the newsgroup comp . sy s . mac . comm.
Also, Qualcomm runs a mailing list specifically for Eudora users — to subscribe, send
email to majordomo@qualcomm.com with subscribe mac-eudora-forum in the body of the
message. Make sure that your return address is correct — it is the address that will be
added to the mailing list. If you have a simple question, ask there before anywhere else
(but use the balloon help and the manual before that). Eudora's manual is also excellent.
Look for it in:
ftp: //f tp.qualcomm.com/quest /mac/eudora/documentat ion/
Evaluation & Details
Although perhaps not perfect, you must have Eudora. That's why I've included it on the
disk. Other than the 32K limitation on message size. I'd like to see more powerful search-
ing capabilities. However, any such quibbles are easily outweighed by Eudora's signifi-
cant capabilities, such as the capability to queue up mail and send it all at once, essential
for anyone using SLIP or PPP. Eudora simply is the way to go for MacTCP-based email.
Eudora 1.5.1 is free, and comes courtesy of the University of Illinois and Qualcomm. You
can retrieve the latest versions from:
ftp://ftp.ticbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.eom/quest/mac/eudora/1 .5/
Eudora 2.1 costs $65 for an individual copy, or $99 for Eudora 2.1 and Spellswell. Prices
drop quickly from there, depending on how many copies you want to buy, so if you're
outfitting a couple of people in an office, check with Qualcomm for the exact discounts.
You can get more information from Qualcomm via email at eudora-sales@qualcomm.com,
or by phone at 800-2-EUDORA.
Other Email Clients
Although I like Eudora, you can try out a number of other email client programs. Til try
to post most of these programs on ftp .tidbits . com, but some of them may have distri-
bution restrictions, and those you'll have to find at the original sites. Unless commercial
(like Emailer) or mentioned otherwise, the following programs are in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
Chapter 21 ^ Email 397
BlitzMail
I didn’t intend to talk much about email programs that
use non-standard protocols, but given Dartmouth
College's outstanding record in developing Macintosh
software, I should briefly mention BlitzMail. Over 90
percent of Dartmouth’s students use email, in large
part because of BlitzMail, which reportedly has an
excellent interface. BlitzMail also supports Apple
events and AppleScript recording, which is still
uncommon. I haven’t seen it in action, mostly because
it requires that you run the BlitzMail server software on
a NeXT workstation or a DEC Alpha workstation. I
thought this limitation was a little ridiculous, until Jim
Matthews, a programmer at Dartmouth and creator of
Fetch, told me that in 1993 Dartmouth supported
11,000 email accounts on only five NeXT machines,
which is incredible. If you’re a system administrator-
type and you’re interested, you can find more
information on BlitzMail at:
uiit.r sai
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Emailer
I wrote about Claris's forthcoming Emailer back in
chapter 12, ’'Commercial Services," because its most
notable feature is Its integration of multiple email
accounts on the commercial online services. As I said
previously, Emailer is an excellent program and fully
supports Internet email via POP and SMTP. I personally
don’t feel it’s quite as good as Eudora, but it’s a very
close second. You won’t go wrong using It primarily for
Internet email. Check back in chapter 12 for more
details on Emaller’s feature set.
LeeMail
Lee Fyock’s $25 shareware, LeeMail, solves one
major problem for some users — It’s primarily an SMTP
mailer. It’s Ideal for use with the few Internet access
providers, like Demon Internet in the United Kingdom,
that use SMTP for sending mail to SLIP and PPP dialup
users. That aside, LeeMail is a simple program that
sports several nice features such as support for
multiple users, aliases, automatically decoded
attachments, and audio notifications of new mail.
LeeMail can hide Its windows when you send it to the
background, auto-quote text when replying to mes-
sages, and support multiple mailboxes. The current
version of LeeMail. 2.0.4, has minimal support for
POP, although the documentation admits that It’s not
ideal as of yet. Lee plans to beef up the POP support
in the future.
LeeMail f
© 1990-1994 by Leo Fyock
LeeMail ts sharevan If you use
Ous program, please send $25 to
Lee Fyock
520 Boston Road
BillBr.ca,MA 01821
Group discounts, site licenses, and
source code licenses kc available
Part IV
398 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MacPost
Although Lund University's MacPost isn't really of
interest to the individual looking for email access to the
Internet, if you have an AppleTalk network that has
access to the Internet already, you may be interested in
checking out the MacPost client and server program.
The MacPost server runs on a Mac and serves mail to
the clients using a proprietary protocol. That’s not
terribly interesting, but the MacPost sen/er can
communicate with an SMTP server as well, thus opening
the doors to the Internet for the MacPost clients. Even
though the MacPost server uses SMTP, the clients only
know how to talk to the server, so you couldn’t use a
different SMTP client program, such as Eudora. For that,
you’d need a POP and SMTP server like MallShare.
Free momoni: 315KB
LDC O l888-t9WLundlMlo«NtyCorfJtlr9C«nUr,
MaiPLink Internet for PowerTalk
The aim of Apple’s PowerTalk Is to provide mail
services to all Macintosh applications and to bring
email to the Macintosh desktop. To that end,
PowerTalk creates a single mailbox on your desktop.
Once PowerTalk is installed, you can exchange email
with any other PowerTalk users on your network, or,
using specially-written gateways, to users on any other
email service. Or at least, that’s the idea. PowerTalk
suffers from a terribly clumsy interface and the slow
arrival of gateways to other services. The main gateway
of Interest for this book Is StarNine’s Mail* Link
Internet for PowerTalk gateway, which enables
PowerTalk to send email to the Internet using SMTP
and receive Internet mall using POP. If you do use
PowerTalk and have access to SMTP and POP servers
via a dedicated connection or SUP or PPP, Mail*Link
Internet is the way to go. For more information, send
StarNine email at infol^starnlne.com, or call
MSitleLink
StorNin* Tvcnnologlat. Inc
510-649-4949; 510-548-0393 (fax). You can retrieve
a time-limited evaluation copy ($49 to purchase) of
Mall* Link Internet for PowerTalk from the following
sites — the Apple site contains a huge archive
containing several PowerTalk gateways.
ftp://ftp.starnine.eom//pub/evals/personal_gws/pt_inet/mail_link_ptinet.sea.hqx
http: / /vww. St amine . com/personalgw. html
ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/system_sw/PowerTalk/
MailDrop
POPmail and Baylor University's MailDrop are the only
two email clients for the Mac that support the IMAP
(Interactive Mail Access Protocol) protocol for retrieving
email. The main difference (as I understand it)
between POP and IMAP Is that IMAP prefers to store
mail on the server, whereas POP prefers to download It
to the Mac. Both have their uses in different environ-
ments, and as more IMAP sites appear, clients like
MailDrop may Increase In popularity, although MailDrop
Mail Drop 1 .1 • C«rl V Ball
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Chapter 21 ^ Email 399
is a relatively simple program at the moment.
MallDrop is available for non-commercial use, and
you can find more information on their Web site.
http : / / ackmo . baylor . edu/f iles/Mail_Drop/inf o . html
POPmail
Created by programmers at the University of Minne-
sota, POPmail Is a free email program that provides
much of Eudora’s feature set and a few extra features,
but without Eudora’s clean implementation or the
capability to queue messages, which limits POPmail’s
utility when using a SLIP or PPP connection. POPmail
has many nice touches, though, including the
capability to resolve URLs found in email messages, a
message browser mailbox window with command
Icons, the capability to create groups of users for
simple distribution lists, and support for multiple users
through multiple settings files. POPmail sports
compatibility with the older POP2 protocol, POP3, and
with the newer IMAP protocol, which also stores your
incoming email on a host computer until you retrieve It.
Most Interestingly, if you connect over a slow modem
or are expecting a large message, POPmail has a
Preview feature that enables you to peruse only the
header and first few lines of the file. Other than the
complete lack of a queuing system that would enable
you to write messages while off-line and send them ail
at once later, POPmail Is a decent application. The
interface feels clunky, but nothing to which you
couldn’t become accustomed.
TechMail
TechMail was developed at MIT and may be freely
distributed. It supports queuing messages, so that you
can compose multiple messages off-line and send
them later. One neat feature enables you to check your
POP mailbox to see how many messages are waiting
and how much disk space they take. My main
complaints with TechMail are that it feels slow when
I’m sending messages. I also think its Interface could
use some help — especially in the configuration dialog
boxes (where it’s never clear what OK and Cancel
really do) and in some of the menu names (such as
Local for all the stuff dealing with email).
Sfa.7/^' ianerottf
TechMail
Copyright o I9B9- IQ94
nossochuseltB Institute of Technology
ftp://net-dist.mit.edu/pub/mac/techmail/
VideoMail
Darald Trinka’s VideoMail is more of an experiment for
his master’s thesis than anything else. It uses audio
and video capabilities present in some Macs (luckily
for my testing, they’re present in my Macintosh 660AV)
to create QuickTime movies and to send them to other
people via SMTP — the standard protocol for sending
continues
Partly
400 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Internet email. When I sent myself a sample movie
(you can have just sound or both sound and video), It
came into Eudora as an attachment that I then opened
in MoviePlayer. VideoMall doesn’t attempt to read
email or do anything other than create and send these
movie messages, and frankly, it does that pretty well.
You can either pay $5 for VideoMall, or more probably,
fill out Darald's questionnaire instead.
Status
Recording Message...
Z-Mail
The $165 Z-Mall Is a commercial email client from
Network Computing Devices. Its main claim to fame Is
that versions of it run on Windows, Unix, Mac, and
even character-based terminals. From what I can tell,
Z-Mail has some powerful features such as rule-based
filtering, sorting, and searching. Using its Z-Script, you
can completely configure how the program works,
customize every part of the user interface, and
automate repetitive tasks. Z-Mail strikes me as very
powerful in the limited use I’ve given it, but it also
feels as though it was ported from Windows or Unix.
The interface is confusing and clumsy, and every now
and then you even hit a place, such as the Z-ScrIpt
window, where you type commands. You can download
an evaluation copy of Z-Mail, but you must get a demo
key from NCD before you can try it out — email
inf o(az - code . com or call 415/898-8649.
http://www.z-code.com/Z-Code/zproducts/z-mac.prod.htnil
Email Utility Programs
Along with the various different programs that enable you to send and receive email,
there are a number of programs that work with the client programs or your stored email
to perform some specific task. I cover a few of them in this section. Unless I provide a
specific URL, assume that all of the following programs are stored in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
I
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 401
AddMail
Alan Staniforth’s AddMail is an odd beast, an SMTP
gateway that can receive mail from an SMTP server
and save it in UUCP format for use by Eudora. Why
would anyone want such a thing, you ask? If, for some
reason, a POP account Isn’t available, as it isn’t for
the dial-up users of Demon Internet in the United
Kingdom, AddMail is perhaps the only reasonable way
you can use Eudora, which othenvise requires POP at
all times. LeeMail would work in this situation, but
needless to say, many people prefer Eudora. So, If
you’re in a similarly unusual situation where you need
AddMail’s talents, check It out at:
ftp://ftp.demon.co.Uk//pub/mac/addmail/
Autograph
Signature-watching Is a favorite pastime on the
Internet, and the people whose signatures are the
most interesting generally customize them for each
message. Assuming you don’t have that kind of time,
a utility like David Kabal’s free Autograph, which
enables you to easily change your signature in Eudora,
might be just the ticket. Autograph supports random
signatures, multiple signatures, and multiple random
signatures. It’s a touch tricky to set up random
signatures, and changing signatures with Autograph
isn’t as automated as you might like (you do have to
open a document each time), but if you want the
multiple random signature capability, Autograph Is
where It’s at.
Autograph
Otv^j KttMl
(About Autograph. .7]
f Sot Slgnatura... 1 i»gr*»»ar» l* t* tuttr*
Quit
AutoShare
Those of you who want to run a mail server with
MallShare (see MallShare listed later In this chapter)
should also check out AutoShare, a free application
from Mikael Hansen that adds some welcome
capabilities to MallShare. AutoShare provides an auto-
reply capability that can immediately return a message
to any inquiries that come in to a specific address. You
also can set AutoShare to reply with different re-
sponses based on the contents of the Subject line,
and It can even attach a binhexed file if necessary.
AutoShare also provides basic mailing list manager
capabilities, and although It could use a little more of a
graphical interface, it has performed like a champ for
me throughout the beta testing (the release version
should be out by the time you read this). You can
request a copy automatically by sending email to
autoshare . update@admin2 . kb . bib . dk with the
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is at autoshare . f aq@admln2 . kb . bib . dk.
Part IV
402 luleruet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Easy View
For most people, Eudora is a sufficiently good email
reading and searching environment. However, Eudora’s
searching capabilities aren't ideal, and it has that
pesky 32K text limit that splits large digests. The
answer, if those two problems haunt you, Is Akif
Eyier's free Easy View, which uses a unique technique
for viewing large text files in certain formats. Easy View
creates an internal index to one or more text files and
breaks them up by message, if it’s a Eudora mailbox
or a digest in a specific format, or by article If It’s a file
like an issue of TidBITS in the setext format. Easy View
has excellent searching capabilities and can extract all
the found Items to a separate file, making it easy to
create subsets of a large amount of data. With the
included GetURL extension (a BBEdIt extension, not a
system extenion). Easy View supports Command-
clicking on URLs to resolve URLs using Anarchie or
MacWeb. Highly recommended.
^ Eas>^Vie\v^”
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ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Eudora Scripts & Prefs
Due to its flexibility, both in configuration and in
scripting, a large number of scripts and plug-in settings
file for Eudora have appeared on the Internet. Their
functions range from increasing the chunk size in
Eudora to creating droplet applications that automati-
cally send files to pre-specified users. I couldn’t hope
to cover each of them, but if you want to do some
exploration, check out the various listings of them at
ftp.tldbits.com in the directory listed below. The
files ending in “-as” are AppleScripts, and those that
have "prefs” in the filename are usually plug-in files
that you drop in your Eudora folder to modify one of
Eudora’s standard behaviors.
mail
Nqy>e Size
eudora-announcer-2 1 3-os . hqx 1 Bk
eudora-outo-send-lo-address-as.hqx 12k
eudora-au tograph- 1 2-sui . hqx 47k
eudorq-autograph-20.hqx 31k
eudora-c I sco-navs .hqx Ik
eudora-colour-lcons.hqx 88k
eudora-conn-scr Ipts-lOI-os.hqx 24k
eudora-con tr I b-no tes . lx t 4k
eudora-dlalup.hqx 103k
eudora-direci-unix-naws-halcyon.hqx Ik
eudora-easgv i eu-rep I y-as . hqx 1 1 k
eudora-ed I t I ng-systen- 10 . hqx 63k
eudoro-ema 1 1 -re f I ec tor . hqx 5 1 k
eudora-ex tra-se 1 1 i ngs . hqx 4k
eudora-ex Iras . hqx S7k
eudoro-m I #h-ma 1 1 , hqx 1 47k
eudora-notei-141 . Ixi 12k
eudora-notes .1x1 11k
eudor 0-0 f f 1 1 ne-reader-un I x . shor 23k
eudoro-on-yacatlon.hqx 45k
eudor o-putserve- 1 . shor 13k
eudoro-puiserue-2 . shor 7k
eudoro-pwserue-3 . shor 20k
eudoro-qo-hc . hqx 1 52k
eudoro-quote-char-soltlng.hqx 2k
eudoro-send- f 1 1 e-ou to-rep I y-os . hqx 1 5k
eudoro-sr i a I pop . shor 1 8k
eudoro-su i te-nsw . hqx 35k
eudora- lob I es-he I per . hqx 3k
eudora- lob I es . hqx 6k
eudora-irash-fl»essages-12b1-as.hqx 13k
cudora-un i x-nous . hqx
bS:
$
111
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F®
i®
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 403
ListSTAR
StarNine, one of the prominent Internet developers in
the Macintosh world, is perhaps best known for its
email gateway products. StarNine is currently testing a
new product called ListSTAR that will provide full
mailing list manager and auto-reply capabilities on the
Macintosh. Although it might seem that such a product
would require a dedicated Internet connection,
StarNine is working on two versions of ListSTAR. One
version requires a dedicated Internet connection, and
another works over a SLIP or PPP connection with a
standard POP mailbox like an individual user would
use. It’s too early to say much else about ListSTAR
other than that it looks extremely promising. It should
be out in mld-1995, so check StarNine’s Web page for
an announcement.
"EMBinple iUHerutr* Sanilce Preference!
http: //WWW. starnine.com/
MacPGP Kit
PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy — it is an encryption
method that you can use to ensure that your mail Is
not read by anyone other than the intended recipient.
The U.S. government restricts the export of PGP
because cryptography, like PGP, is classified as
munitions — I won’t get into the debate here other than
to note that because of this getting MacPGP is a pain.
Gregory Combs created the MacPGP Kit to bring
together a number of the resources available to make
MacPGP (once you get it) easier to use. I consider it
still too difficult for standard use, but if you’re
seriously interested in secure email, check out the
MacPGP Kit. The resources listed below should get you
started with MacPGP and the various related utilities.
http://www.utexas.edu/-grgcombs/htmls/crypto.html
http : / /www2 . hawaii . edu /-phinely /MacPGP - and -AppleScript • FAQ . html
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Part IV
404 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Mail Processor
Mail Processor is a good idea in need of a better
program. It’s a stand-alone HyperCard stack that
reads In a Eudora mailbox, which you can then use to
generate lists of messages that contain a certain
string. I often want to find information in large
mailboxes of old mail, but I encountered various errors
when using Mall Processor. Because It isn’t particu-
larly quick, It probably wouldn’t work well with my really
large mailboxes. Although Jim Allison is distributing
Mail Processor as shareware for $24, it feels much
more like a tool he built for himself than for use by
others. If Mail Processor sounds like something you’d
use, give it a try.
MailConverter
Richard Shapiro’s free MailConverter can convert a
number of mail formats into Eudora mailboxes,
Including messages from America Online, eWorld,
LeeMall, MacEMail, cc:Mail (limited support), VMS
mail (limited support). Pine, Elm, and files saved
from various newsreaders, including NewsWatcher.
MailConverter also will break up mail digests into
individual messages. MailConverter supports drag-and-
drop and is rather flexible in terms of dealing with
strange headers.
MsilConuerter Settings
□ Rllaui only TEIIT files os Input
Oelote Input file after conuertlng
0 Confirm before toulng
0 Truncate output filename
□ tlestrlct messagus to 32K
0Send to application
Oefoult Input folden [ fldom Engst moll I
Default sooe folder: [ Eudora Folder ~)
Creator,
rile type:
|CS0m
02-MoII [Seme at.
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D
( Cancel ][( OK
ftp: / /ftp. tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
MailShare
All of these POP- and SMTP-based email clients
discussed in this chapter are all fine and nice, but
what if you want to run a mall server? Glenn
Anderson’s free MailShare is your answer. It runs on a
Macintosh with a permanent Internet connection. It
sends and receives mail destined for your site, storing
mall for multiple users in POP mailboxes. It’s easy to
set up and configure for basic use and for simple
mailing lists, and works extremely well, even on a
relatively old Mac like my SE/30. If you need a mail
server, you won’t do any better than MailShare. You
can get the latest version from the URL below. The
Web URL is actually a full tutorial and informational
page on how to set up and maintain MailShare. Highly
recommended!
About MailShare r
MaftShar# 1 0fc5
A POPS and SMTP s*rv#r for the Macintosh
By GWnn Anderson
Thanks to
Staphan Somogyt, Tom Maufar, Kee Nathary , Faarghas McKay , Owen Vatson,
Fraf* Lovnay , Steve Domar, Scott Gruby , Mark Qgilvie, Varran Jones,
MiTo (Michael) Sharp. M4caal Hansan. [>on V Strickland, vmte Strickland.
Andri PIrard, Jean-Pierre Kuypars
and the many other people who helped last and Improve MailShare.
® 1993, 1994, I993 0lann Anderson
parts derived from the RSA Data Security, Inc. M05 Message-Digest ATgorithm
http: //vwAv.v/internet .com/-carl/mailstiare/mailshare.html
Chapter 21 ♦ Email 405
Mpack
Although most modern email programs automatically If™
understand and decode MIME attachments that
contain non-textual information, sometimes you need
to be able to do it manually. There’s a stand-alone
MIME utility, called Mpack, which can pack and unpack
MIME files. You’re most likely to need Mpack if you
don’t use a MIME-compatible mailer, such as ___
InterCon’s UUCP/Connect. Mpack has worked fine the
few times I’ve had an excuse to use it, but I haven’t
tested it heavily.
Mpock
Uerslon I.S
by John Myers
Macintosh port by Chris Newman
0 1995-1995 Carnegie Mellon Unluersity
See Help Using Mpack... for Help
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Notify Mail
If you’re interested in being notified when you receive
new mail, check out NotifyMail, which is $18
shareware from Scott Gruby. The main limitations to
NotifyMail are that it requires a dedicated Internet
connection (it doesn’t make much sense to use it via
SLIP or PPP, since you can just have Eudora check
when you connect) and it also requires either a full
Unix or VMS shell account, or a POP account on a
MailSharc server (the SMTP server for the Mac).
NotifyMail uses an extension to listen for Rnger
connections, and when it hears one for the appropriate
person, it notifies you in any one of a number of user-
configurable ways. NotifyMail seems well thought out; I
simply can’t imagine being notified 200 times a day
that I have new mail.
Signature Randomizer
Some people dislike using the same signature all the
time, but it’s a pain to create them manually or
continually swap signature files in and out of your
Eudora Folder. Jonathan Baumgartner's free Signature
Randomizer may be just what you need, in this case. It
randomly picks a signature file from a set you create
each time you run the program, and it can optionally
pick one and then quit, making it an ideal candidate
for your Startup Items folder (since then it would pick
one on each restart, then quit).
Uerilon 1.0, Hprll lU, 1995. 01995 Jonolhon
Baumgartner
<lnlemet: Janathon.D.Boumgartner»3>unti edu>
Part IV
406 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
VacationMail
I try to avoid talking about Mac programs that rely on a
Unix shell account because it adds a level of complex-
ity that frustrates many people. However, MR Mac
Software’s $25 VacationMail utility is so well done
that I couldn’t resist. When you go away on vacation,
you use VacationMail to set up an auto-reply to all mall
on your account (It’s really easy), and VacationMail
configures a Unix program called Vacation for you.
VacationMail is smart enough not to reply to mailing
lists and only sends one message per week to any
address, so people won’t be bothered by your vacation
message If they’re just trying to leave mail for when
you return. VacationMail is well thought out and
elegant, so If you have a full Unix shell account and
are Interested in a vacation message capability while
you’re away check It out. You can even register by
email.
Emptying the Mailbox
This chapter may have seemed a little biased toward Eudora, but hey, it really is the best
MacTCP-based email program available today. And that's the free version — the commer-
cial version is even better. If you're the contrary sort, feel free to check out the other email
clients I mentioned (especially Emailer, once it's available), and also consider exploring
some of the email utilities I worked through.
When you're done, let's move on to the hustle and bustle of Usenet news, where there's
no clear choice of which newsreader is the best.
eGm UacationMail QuickStart
VacationMail QuickStart
VacationMail configures your mail server to
automatically notify people that you are
unavailable without having to leave your Mac
on. When people send you email, a message
will automatically be sent to them saying
that you are unavailable and will read the
email when you return.
/nstructions:
To use VacationMail, first choose Settings
from the File Menu and follow the online help.
Then, choose VacationMail from the Ffle Menu
and follow the online help.
Note
Chapter
22
Usenet News
The sections on email were easy to write because I have a strong opinion about which
email program I think is best. In the realm of newsreaders for Usenet news, the field is a
little smaller, but much stronger. I currently know of a number of MacTCP-based
newsreading solutions, and three of them are neck and neck. Of the freeware and
shareware, I prefer NewsWatcher, developed by Jolin Norstad of Disinfectant fame.
However, there's a lot to like about Nuntius, from Peter Speck. And confusing the issue is
a commercial program, NewsHopper, which is excellent and is the only one that supports
offline newsreading. In the end, I think you must try all three (there's a demo for
NewsHopper available for FTP) and decide for yourself, because each one brings a
different interface philosophy and design to the task of reading news. I'll discuss them in
roughly the order in which I suggest you check them out, placing NewsHopper last only
because it's commercial and tlius has a higher cost of entry than the others.
Since you can try all the main newsreaders for free, I recommend that you form your own
opinion and don't clog the nets with questions asking which newsreaders people like best.
Newsreaders are very personal programs, and only you can decide which is right for you.
NewsWatcher
The major challenge that the newsreaders face is presenting a clean and quick method of
navigating through gobs of information. Interface is all-important (and a purely personal
Note
408 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
choice, of course), but raw speed doesn't hurt either, and NewsWatcher feels fast. Steve
Falkenburg of Apple first created NewsWatcher, and John Norstad later picked it up to
continue development. John has gone nuts with NewsWatcher and made the current
version, 2.0b24 (don't be scared off by the b24 bit since NewsWatcher is very stable) into
one of the best Internet programs available today.
Installation and Setup
When you launch NewsWatcher for the very first time, it asks if you plan to use
NewsWatcher on your own, on a shared Mac with someone else who will
use NewsWatcher, or in a lab situation. The answer to this question determines
how NewsWatcher sets up your preferences. If you choose Private, NewsWatcher creates
your preferences in the Preferences folder. If you choose Shared, NewsWatcher prompts
you to name a folder in which it will store your personal preferences. And finally, if you
click on Lab, NewsWatcher prompts you to insert a floppy disk on which it will store
your preferences.
Because NewsWatcher supports Internet Config (see chapter 27, "Utilities & Miscellany"),
if you have already configured Internet Config completely (and it's included on the disk so
you can do this), you won't have to fill in the basic settings discussed below— they'll already
be present, Internet Config is a good thing.
Once you've determined how you will use NewsWatcher, it prompts you for five pieces
of information, three of which are required and two of which are optional. First, it asks for
the addresses of your news server and your mail server (see figure 22.1), which are
required.
Please enter the addresses of your neuis and mail seruers.
Vou may enter either domain names (*'host.sub. domain") or IP
addresses (“128.1.2.3"). Domain names are preferred. Get this
Information from your netiuork administrator.
Nems Seruer:
Mall Seruer:
[ Cancel ) [[ OK |
neius.halcyon.com
mall. halcyon. com|
Figure 22.1 NewsWatcher Server Addresses configuration dialog.
Note
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Nezus 409
The only way to figure out these addresses is to ask your system administrator. After you
fill them in and click on the OK button, NewsWatcher presents another similar dialog that
asks for your full name, your organization, and your email address. It requires only the
last of the three, but there's no reason not to input the others (see figure 22.2).
Personal Information
Please enter the follouiing information about yourself. Vou must
enter at least your email address.
This information is included in the headers of all of your nems
postings and mail messages.
Full name:
Organization:
Email address:
[ Cancel )
Rdam C. Engst
TidBITS
ace@>tidbits.com
Figure 22.2 NezosWatclier Personal Information dialog.
After you enter all that information, NewsWatcher goes out to your server and down-
loads the full group list, the huge list of all the newsgroups available on your site. Down-
loading this list takes a long time, possibly as long as 10 or 20 minutes over a 2,400 bps
modem! Be prepared to wait, but don't worry. As long as you don't throw out the
NewsWatcher Preferences file in your Preferences folder, NewsWatcher never again has
to download all the groups. If NewsWatcher does try to download the full group list on
future launches, check to make sure an anti-vdrus program or something else hasn't
prevented NewsWatcher from properly creating its NewsWatcher Prefs file.
Some people report NewsWatcher crashing or having other problems as it attempts to sort
the full group list. In many cases, this is caused by NczusWatcher not having enough
memory to deal zoith so many newsgroups. If you have this problem, in the Finder select the
NewsWatcher icon, choose Get Info from the File menu, and increase the Preferred memory
size by a few hundred kilobytes.
After you have the massively long list of all the groups onscreen, from the File menu
choose New Group Window. NewsWatcher then opens a small, empty window. Scroll
through the Full Group List (if you accidentally close it or want to add groups again later,
look for Show Full Group List under the Windows menu) and drag interesting groups
over to the small, empty window. Don't worry about the order; you can drag groups
Part IV
410 hiternei Starter Kit for Macintosh
within that window to put them in the right order after you're finished subscribing to
groups. Eventually, you have a nice set of groups to read. From the File menu, choose
Save and then name your group list whatever you want (see figure 22.3).
!□!
Rdom's NeuisLUatcher Groups
30 groups |
1 7
comp jur . mac . m 1 rc
1
comp . sys . mac . d I ges i
6
ha 1 cyon . announce
comp . sys . mac . announce
comp. Infosysiems. announce
590
comp . 1 n terne t . ne t-happen 1 ngs
5009
comp . sys . mac . comm
837
halcyon. general
256
ha 1 cyon .slip
6
rec. humor . funny
14
clari .neujs.sex
30
clari .nb. apple
80
clari . nb . te 1 ecom
1083
alt. in terne t . med 1 a-couerage
4040
comp, infosystems.uiwui.misc
4521
comp .inf osys terns . www . prou 1 ders
3710
comp .inf osys terns . uDtuw . users
643
clari. spor ts . baseba i 1
996
ciari .sports.bosketbai 1
10
c i ar i . f ea ture . m i ss_manners
449
seattie.poi i tics
18
ciari . feature. di ibert
1958
seattie.generai
6875
comp . sys . mac . harduiare
226
comp .inf osys terns . uia i s
243
comp .inf osys terns . gopher
739
ai t. hypertext
1468
al t.bbs. internet
2302
alt. In terne t.seru Ices
50
biz. marketp 1 ace . computers . mac
o
1 1
Figure 22.3 NewsWatcher group list.
That's about it. You're ready to read news, although you may want to configure some
more preferences first. If you select Preferences from the File menu, NewsWatcher
presents you with a dialog containing some general options (see figure 22.4). At the top of
the dialog is a pop-up menu that lists other types of preferences you can set, such as the
location to save files, your signature for postings, the font and size for viewing articles
and lists, and various other settings. Some of these match the settings from Internet
Config; others are specific to NewsWatcher.
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet News 41 1
EHtracting Binaries
Miscellaneous Options
Figure 22A NezusWatcber's many preferences.
Basic Usage
To read a newsgroup in your list, double-click on it or use one of the keypad shortcuts (if
you have them enabled from the Preferences dialog). NewsWatcher opens another
window containing the subjects of all the articles in the group, and alongside each subject
is either a dash or a triangle and number (see figure 22.5).
comp.si|%.mtK.comm
594 articles, 580 unreod
^ itwn
Be: <<<<«<<TeiPel to PPP? Pestible?>>>>»
Jog Rl len
Be <«<<<<«Telnet to PPP’ Possible?>»>>
y Keuin Kadoe
Re. <<«<<<<Telnet to PPP? Possible?>>>>>
-
Eduin Miller
Be: Offline Mees Redder
> 2
Edam Miller
Re: Supra us. USR
-
Edein Miller
Re: Uersotere-Sgnergy Softeore
rr 3
Potrick Hoepfner
Re: itelo: OHS confias In MocTCP
1
✓ f*eter H LeeVs
nocTtf 1
> 2
JL^
Jlia Uong
Johnathon 5
Greg Steear
Bob Church
J MB
Stefan 0. I
✓ The Met Bw
.rum Price
y Ceoffreg 0<
Peter Stuei
Re: Help: DTtS configs In MacTCP
OHi _ I ✓Rb: Help: DNS conflgs In MacTCP
Free: peter Cesi l .peter .con. ou (Peter H Leei*>
Organization: Curtin Uni v>er si tg
Dote: Ued, Rpr 12, 1005 0:14:34 PM
Hewsgroups coepsys noc.coea Rrtlcle 2 of 3 In thread _
>These are the oddreses tio glues ee for eg host ord naneseruers:
> naneseruers
>t>onalre.ccl t.orlzono.edu 128. 190. 139. 1 1
•snoe.cslt.arlzona.edu 126.196.133.09
•orgarpipe 128.196.196.229
In flocTCP-
•hoeeservers:
•bonolre.cclt arlzona.edu 128 106.139.11
•snoe.ccit.orizona.edu 126.196.133.69
•orgonplpe 12B 109 189 229
This is coapleteig erong. Closer to correct icould be:
ccit.arlzona.edu 128.106 130 II (•)
128 109 130 II
128 109 133 69
128 196 186.229
Bead the docs beloe
Peter
rf
Enjog,
9
Figure 22.5 NewsWatcher newsgroup and article windows.
Part IV
412 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
The dash indicates that the article is the only one in the thread, the triangle indicates that
there are more than one, and the number indicates how many articles are in that thread.
You can click the triangle to show the other articles, just as you click a triangle in the
System 7 Finder to display a folder's contents. I sometimes leave the option that displays
author names turned off, because NewsWatcher draws windows much faster that way. If
you choose not to download author names, there's no reason to expand a thread with the
triangle control, since all the articles have the same subject and thus look identical.
Double-clicking on an article subject in the newsgroup window opens a window (see
figure 22.5 again) that NewsWatcher sizes to the article to prevent unnecessary scrolling.
However, if you click on the little lock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the window,
NewsWatcher uses that window size until you unlock the icon. With an article window
open, you can go to the next article, next thread, or next group (marking the current
group as read) with keyboard shortcuts or, if you have them turned on in the preferences,
a keypad shortcut. I prefer using the keypad shortcuts because reading news should be an
easy process, and using a Command-key combination is too hard for hundreds of repeti-
tions. That's especially true for those of us with repetitive stress injuries.
In NewsWatcher, you also can reply to an article via email or post a follow-up to the
newsgroup using commands in the News menu. Useful icons at the top of the reply
window let you specify if the reply should go to the newsgroup, to the poster or another
email address that you can enter, or to your email account if you wanted to save a copy
yourself (see figure 22.6).
Re: Help: DNS configs In MacTCP
jiMi
list
✓
= ■
✓ ( Send )
To: petertoai 1 .peter . con.au (Peter M Leuis)
Subject: Re: Help: DMS configs in MocTCP
In article <pe ter- 130495 12 1434000 IProcky. curl I n.edu.au>^ peterPraal I .peter .coni.ou
(Peter N Leuis> vrote:
> Rll hacTCP DMS servers should be set up thusly:
>
donain.con.
1.2. 3. 4
<♦>
>
1.2. 3. 4
< >
>
5. 6. 7. 8
< >
Thanks, Peter I
cheers . , . -Adam
JX
Figure 22.6 NewsWatcher reply windozo.
When you're back in a newsgroup window, you also can quickly mark articles as read or
unread, which can be handy for getting through a group quickly. That's about all there is
to reading news with NewsWatcher — it's an elegant program.
Note
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet News 413
"Z, You might try selecting all the articles in the group with Select All, then holding down the
o Command key and clicking on the ones you want to read to deselect them. From the News
menu, choose Mark Read, which puts a check mark next to each of the still-selected uninter-
esting articles. Now you can select the first article in the group and read straight through
without being bothered by any of the uninteresting stuff.
Special Features
NewsWatcher feels fast, clean, and easy to use, which is the result of nice touches at every
level. I cannot live without keypad shortcuts or the Spacebar shortcut that moves you to
the next screen and then to the next unread message, just as in a Unix newsreader.
John removed the capability to move through the massive full group list by typing the
first few characters of each part of the newsgroup name, replacing it with a more generic
Find function that's more useful and easier to use (since most newsgroups start with the
same letters anyway).
NewsWatcher has an interesting feature to open referenced articles, which theoretically
enables you to go back in a thread even if you have already marked earlier articles as read. All
you must do is Command-click on the message-lD if one exists at the top of the article,
although many people edit out the message-ID. Still, it's a nice idea.
John has enhanced this feature so that Command-clicking on an email address opens a
new mail window set to send email to that person. Even better, if you Command-click on
an FTP URL that someone has included in a posting, NewsWatcher calls either Anarchie
or Fetch (you set it) and resolves the URL by retrieving the file or directory. But of course,
there are many non-FTP URLs passed around in Usenet news, so NewsWatcher can also
pass HTTP URLs to a Web browser such as MacWeb, Gopher URLs to TurboGopher, and
so on. Other URLs that John supports include WAIS, Telnet, tn3270. Finger, Whois, and
Ph, and you can set the programs to help out in each case.
NewsWatcher has automatic extraction code that enables it to automatically download
and decode binary files that are posted — usually in BinHex or uuencoded form. Even
better, NewsWatcher supports Apple's Drag Manager, so you can just drag the icon
linked to a binary file to a folder in your Finder, and NewsWatcher downloads it and calls
the appropriate programs to decode it.
Drag Manager support extends beyond just downloading binary files, though, so you can
drag the contents of any NewsWatcher window to the Finder to create a text clipping, or
to another Drag Manager-aware program window to copy the text into that document.
Part IV
Note
414 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Drag Manager support does require System 7.5 or the full set of Drag Manager extensions
for System 7.1.1.
For those of you who read news on a Unix machine using rn or nn at work and perhaps
use NewsWatcher at home to read news on that same Unix machine, NewsWatcher has a
feature that enables you to use the same .newsrc file so that you don't have to duplicate
reading effort.
The Remote Host Information preferences control this feature for retrieving the .newsrc file
from a Unix shell account. Don’t worry about those preferences if you don't also read news
under Unix and wish to share the . newsrc file.
Evaluation and Details
The main complaint I can think of in regard to NewsWatcher is that the text window
limits prevent you from posting messages larger than 32K. Chalk up another one for
Apple's limited TextEdit routines. You can read messages larger than 32K, though, since
NewsWatcher displays only 32K at a time and provides a horizontal slider bar to reach
additional 32K chunks of the same message. Additional missing features include full
filtering and the capability of posting attachments to messages. Both of those limitations
are starting to be addressed in a variant of NewsWatcher called Value-Added
NewsWatcher (which is otherwise basically the same). See the capsule review following
for more information on VA-NewsWatcher.
Overall, though, what can I say? John Norstad has once again provided the Macintosh
community with a great freeware program. John's free Disinfectant is wonderful, but I
certainly hope that people have more occasion to read news than to search for viruses.
However, I shouldn't imply that NewsWatcher is perfect or, more accurately, complete.
John has big plans for NewsWatcher, but because it's a labor of love, he works at his own
pace and implements features that he wants or feels that the program needs in order to be
complete. Because of this, I always enjoy reading the To Do document, which lists all the
wishes and requests for future versions, including my big favorites, offline reading and
message filtering based on the contents of the messages or headers.
NewsWatcher 2.0b24 is free, and you can retrieve the latest version from either of the
following:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp: / /ftp . acns . nwu . edu/pub/newswatcher/
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet News 415
Nuntius
The second of the heavy-hitting MacTCP-based newsreaders is Peter Speck's free Nuntius
2.0. Long a favorite of the Usenet crowd, Nuntius combines a Finder-like interface with
some clever integration with other programs for mundane tasks such as email and text
editing.
Installation and Setup
The first time you launch Nuntius, it quickly asks for your news server's address (which
you get, of course, by bribing your system administrator with chocolate). It then proceeds
to retrieve the entire list of newsgroups. This long download happens only the first time
you start Nuntius; the program is smart enough to keep that information around for later
use.
After it has the entire list of groups, Nuntius opens two windows. One, called All Groups,
contains a Finder-like outline of all the groups (see figure 22.7).
I> On clari
> CD CO
Cd
t> QD admin
ll
T7 CD ai
Bl adu
i fuzzg
U) genetic
2| announce
ll papers
Ul nat-lang
[3] neural -nets
.Rl. nlflnn-|ffjnw,-:rpn,
Figure 22,7 Nuntius All Groups zvindow.
This method of outlining the hierarchy of new newsgroups works better than the way
NewsWatcher and InterNews list them in one big list, simply because the lists are smaller.
However, if you know what newsgroup you want, say comp . sys . mac . announce, you
must open the comp folder by clicking on its triangle and then open the sys folder and the
mac folder before you see the announce newsgroup. It takes a while to open each folder
and scroll down to the right spot to open the next one. Although typing a key takes you to
a newsgroup starting with that letter, I find that feature slow and awkward.
Part IV
Note
416 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The second window Nuntius opens is empty and is called Untitled group list 1. When you
see an interesting group or groups (you can select more than one at a time) in Nuntius, as
in NewsWatcher, you click them and drag them into the Untitled group list 1 window
(which you should immediately save with a different name as in figure 22.8).
=□= Adam's Nuntius groups ilZli
cl a ri .feat u re .dave_ba r r y
• clari. feature. miss-mannera
• clari .local .Washington. briefs
• cl a ri. news .good news
• clari.news.sex
• comp.sys.mac.misc
• comp.sys. mac. portables
• comp.sys. mac.announce
• comp.sys. mac.apps
• comp.sys. mac .digest
• comp.sys. mac. hardware
• comp.sys. mac .system
? halcyon.announce
? halcyon.general
? news. lists
? rec.arts.erotica
? rec.aquaria
? rec.food.cooking
? rec. food. recipes
•O
■ 1 ■
Figure 22.8 Nuntius group list window.
In figure 22.8, some of the newsgroups have bullets next to their names, indicating that
they have new messages in them. Some newsgroups have question marks next to them
because I took this screen shot as Nuntius was querying my news server to see which
newsgroups had new articles. Only one group was empty, clari.feature.dave_barry,
so that group has nothing next to it.
Unfortunately, clari . feature . dave_barry has been removed from ClariNet by Knight-
Ridder (the company that syndicates Dave Bany's columns), reportedly because of copyright
violations. "...And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is
no joy in Mudville—Dave Barry has pulled out."
Although they are not necessary for you to start reading news, you can and should set a
number of preferences in the Prefs menu (see figure 22.9). Ideally, Td like to see Peter
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet hlews 417
Speck bring the items in the Prefs menu together in a single dialog — you don't change
preferences often and the menu seems a bit long and unwieldy.
Prefs
Font size
Font
Vour name...
Binaries...
Editing articles...
Mail...
Neuis seruer...
Enpire...
Misc...
Check for neiu groups
Rebuild list of all groups
Check for neu.i articles noui §§U
Forget Password
Close idle NNTP connections tOI
Flush all caches
►
►
Figure 22.9 Nuntius Prefs menu.
Of the several preferences you can set, the most interesting is the Editing articles item in
the Prefs menu. It lets you specify which program you want to use to edit your articles.
Basic Usage
As you might expect, double-clicking on a newsgroup name causes Nuntius to open the
list of articles in that group. In an interesting and useful twist, Nuntius can open multiple
groups at the same time. This feature is especially useful, because Nuntius doesn't seem
to work as quickly as News Watcher. What you can do is start opening a large group and
then open a small group, and have that large group opening in the background as you
read the articles in the small group. Even given NewsWatcher's speed, Td like to see this
feature migrate over, because it enables you to work more efficiently.
In any event, opening a newsgroup window displays a window listing the articles in the
group (see figure 22.10).
Part IV
418
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
2048 bitkeyainriacPGP 2.6.2
Re: 7.5.1 impreesione
' comp.sys.mac.gpps
Tyler Cheung
Michael Satllor
Coil n Lai
Re. Addreas Book & Calendar (networkable) • LarrySherman
Re Adobe Illustrator 5.5 <--> Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (77?)
• Preston Gordon
Re: Adobe Illustrator and MacOS Y7.5 1 • Steven Haddock; x3639
Adobe LE editions • Richard Quin
Re: Aladdin Desktop Too1s7 aEdKroening
Re Alternatives to Nevswatcher7 (...vreader that shows authors* names) • Dan Flatin
• Jason Untulis
• Arthur Maruyama
Re: newreader that shows author names • Theo Yen Riet
Re: And its still too slow for me.. (Wes Re; Word 6.0. 1 update)
Rej And its still too slow for me.. (Was Re: Word 6.0. 1 update)
Re; Word 6.0.1 update
Bo yon I. Boyanov
KeithA823
Grady Ward
Isako Hoshino
Jim Conner
Cwld Gutierrez
J'-'itf r-ij D.
ANNOUNCE: EesyTyper^ 1.0 for Macintosh available via ftp • Ken Lendau
Re: ANNOUNCEMENT ^KoMa fonts available on Macintosh • Susan Petry
• John Rethorst
Figure 22.10 Niintiiis nezosgroup ivindoiv.
The subject of each message appears on the left, unless the message is in the middle of a
thread. This use of white space may seem like a waste, but I think it works well to indicate
the relative size of threads. Any subject line changes are indicated by the indented subjects
within the thread. The names of the authors of each message appear to the right, preceded
by bullets if that article is new. Double-clicking on a thread (Nuntius won't let you read a
single article in the middle of a thread) opens the article window (see figure 22.11).
modems -
^ Subject; nodvns
♦
Fro»: Ricb*rd Cov*rt, rlohrdoGb&lcyon.oom
1
D*U: 23 Jul 1993 15:26:34 -0700
1
I AM lookix^ for % n»w modes 14.400 btud for 4 nsdos comp4tible. If you
If
you tre satisfied your modem and hoe it works with Haloyon, please post
“i
li
Richard Covert <riohrdc0halcyon.cof»>
i
t> Turmoil: Re: modems
V'
^ Douglas Dobbins: Re: modems
ry Subject: Re: modems
From: Ken Pizz3.n3., ken8halcyon.com
Date; 24 Jul 1993 10:51 34 -0700
1
In article <22poiq$ibq8nwfocus w».oom> richrdcQhaloyon.oom (Richard Covert) w
■I'l?
>I am looking for a new modem 14,400 baud for a msdos compatible. If you
‘1
>you are satisfied your modem and how it works with Kaloyon, please post.
m
it'
FVI17: I'm happily using a QuickComm Spirit II modem...
1
— Ken Piszini
1
i> Dan Lawrence Re: modems
tt
a
Figure 22.11 Nuntius article loindoio.
Note
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Nexus 419
Nuntius uses a custom interface for determining what you see and don't see, and it's
another reason why you may prefer one newsreader over another. I have Nuntius set to
open only the first article in the thread, because there's no point in transferring all that
data if the first article proves to be uninteresting. Opening threads of uninteresting articles
is especially a problem over a slow link or with a large thread, although you can scroll
through the article window as the program fills it. If you have a fast network connection,
you probably don't care about this problem as much, and you can set Nuntius to open all
articles when opening a thread.
You can select multiple threads in the newsgroup window, and by pressing the Spacebar,
you can open them. Repeated presses of the Spacebar move you through all the selected
threads. Once you have a number of threads open, you can navigate between them from
the article window, either by using the right and left arrow keys or by using the arrows in
the lower left of the article window. The down arrow in the article window scrolls down
and then takes you to the next thread.
My biggest problem with Nuntius is that I don't want to spend the time opening all the
articles in a thread to begin with, but at the same time I want to open the triangles from
the keyboard because clicking on them with the mouse is too much work for such a
common action. I may be missing something, but 1 cannot find any way of opening the
triangle this way in the scanty documentation or in the good, but spotty, balloon help.
Perhaps the coolest aspect of using Nuntius comes when you want to reply to a letter or
post a follow-up. Nuntius doesn't, in fact, know how to do much in terms of sending
email or editing text; instead, it asks other applications to perform those tasks. So, if you
want to mail a response, Nuntius uses an AppleScript to launch or switch to Eudora 1.5.1,
and then fills in the header and quotes the article text in the body of the message. Actu-
ally, if you don't select any text in the Nuntius article window, Nuntius passes only the
Subject line to Eudora. If you do select some text, Nuntius passes the proper address to
send mail to and quotes the text you selected. You have to switch back to Nuntius manu-
ally when you're finished sending the message in Eudora.
If you don't have AppleScript installed, Nuntius can still use Eudora to reply via email, but
it's an old hack Peter Speck figured out years ago. It may not work as well as the AppleScript
method.
As cool as that setup is, I prefer the way Nuntius calls another program to edit follow-up
posts. I live in Nisus Writer, and using any other text editor or word processor, even on
the Mac, irritates me to no end because none of them, in my opinion, provides a compa-
rable set of features for writing and editing text. So, whenever I post an article from
Nuntius, 1 get to edit that article in Nisus Writer. (Note that if you use a word processor
other than Nisus, you probably must save your files as text if your word processor doesn't
use text files as its native format.)
Part IV
420 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
This technique does have drawbacks. You must have enough memory to run both pro-
grams at once, and you must use Eudora to send mail. But even with these limitations
(which don't bother me at all, since I have enough RAM and I use Eudora anyway). I'd
like to see more programs follow this method. The trick with editing files isn't even all
that fancy. Nuntius saves a file with the information to be edited (on the desktop or some
other folder you set); then it asks the Finder to open that document with tlie editor you
defined. After you're finished editing, you normally save and close the file. Then you
manually switch back to Nuntius, which waits patiently for you to finish and then asks if
you want to post that article. To avoid clutter, you can click on a checkbox to trash the
temporary file when you're finished. I see no reason why other programs couldn't use
this technique, although Nisus Writer is especially well-suited to it because its native file
format is straight text.
Special Features
Aside from Nuntius's extremely cool method of sending mail and posting follow-ups, it
has several features that set it apart from the crowd. The Spacebar works as it does in
Unix newsreaders — as a kind of magic key that performs the most likely next action.
Unfortunately, I wanted it to open the next closed triangle in an article window, and it
didn't do that, so for me the magic disappeared at that point.
Nuntius takes the concept of resolving URLs one step further than even NewsWatcher.
When Nuntius brings in articles in a thread, it searches for any URLs in the article and
makes them hot, just as in a Web browser. They even come in as blue and underlined, also
just like a Web browser. There's no need to Command-click; an unmodified click works
fine to resolve a large number of URL types.
Although Nuntius does an excellent job of grouping articles into threads, the most recent
versions also sort them alphabetically, which I happen to like, although I could see where
others would prefer a chronological sort, as NewsWatcher does.
In Nuntius, you can set the font and size for any of its windows with the Font and Size
menus in the Prefs menu, and those settings apply to all newsgroup and article windows.
Of all the newsreaders, Nuntius has the most control over which threads it displays,
enabling you to show all threads, threads updated today, threads with unread articles, or
threads with new articles. You can choose among these threads from the Threads menu. A
similar set of commands in the Articles menu enables you to expand all articles, the first
article, new articles, unread articles, or no articles. Unfortunately, there aren't keyboard
shortcuts for these commands; adding them might be a partial solution to my complaint
about not being able to expand articles from the keyboard easily.
Nuntius is Power Mac-native, and combined with its capability to bring in multiple
groups at once and automatically update them while you're reading something else, it's
definitely one of the quickest of the newsreaders.
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Neios 421
Evaluation and Details
Despite my love affair with its method of using other programs for mail and editing and
its clever method of multitasking different actions so that you can work more efficiently,
Nuntius simply doesn't make it for me. If there were a better way of just zipping through
a set of articles without mucking with the mouse or waiting for Nuntius to transfer the
full text of each article, I might use it over NewsWatcher.
Nuntius has essentially no documentation, although Aaron Freimark has done a lot of
work in creating a FAQ and maintains a Web site with information about the program.
Nuntius does come with a notes document that lists some hidden keyboard shortcuts and
version changes, but that's it. The balloon help is useful, although not as obviously great
as in Eudora. Support is primarily available by asking questions on comp . sys . mac . comm —
the Nuntius mailing list was disbanded because all the traffic was on the newsgroup.
Finally, I've had more trouble with Nuntius crashing than I did with either InterNews or
NewsWatcher. Your mileage may vary with a different machine, network connection, and
set of extensions.
Nuntius is free, and you can find the latest versions of Nuntius at the following FTP sites
and more information at the Web site:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp: //ftp. ruc.dk/pub/nuntius/
http://guru.med.cornell.edu/-aaron/nuntius/nuntius.html
NewsHopper
In the second edition of the book, Laurent Humbert, who wrote NewsHopper, asked me
not to say anything about NewsHopper, which wasn't quite ready for prime time. Now it
is, and especially in the most recent version 1.1, NewsHopper has become one of the best
of the MacTCP-based newsreaders. The two features that set it apart from all the others
are excellent support for offline newsreading and good filtering.
Installation and Setup
NewsHopper doesn't force you to work through any immediate setup upon startup;
instead, after you launch the program, you must create a new newsfile by selecting New
from the File menu. At that point, NewsHopper starts asking configuration questions, but
if you've previously configured Internet Config, NewsHopper can retrieve all of your
settings from Internet Config's database. One way or another, you first see a dialog asking
for the name of your news server (see figure 22.12). After that, NewsHopper presents you
Part IV
422 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
with a standard file dialog so you can name and save the folder that contains all of your
settings. After you've saved that folder, NewsHopper opens your News window and
another dialog asking for your real name, your organization, and your email address (see
figure 22.13).
Figure 22.12 NeivsHopper news server configuration.
Figure 22.13 NewsHopper lIserlD configuration.
NewsHopper has several other sets of preferences in the hierarchical Settings menu under
the Edit menu which aren't governed by Internet Config, things like whether or not you
want to use an external text editor, if you want to ignore confirmation alerts, and if
windows should avoid hiding the Finder's icons. Also included are options for saving
window positions, showing complete addresses for the senders, and marking articles as
"not new" automatically. Needless to say, none of these settings are the slightest bit
necessar)^ — worry about them after you've used NewsHopper a bit.
After working through the basic settings — which is as easy as accepting the existing
settings if you've configured Internet Config — you're left with a News window. At this
point, there are two basic ways of subscribing to newsgroups. If you know the exact
names of the groups you want to read, choose Subscribe from the Groups menu (see
figure 22.14) and enter the name of the newsgroup. I usually set NewsHopper to fetch all
new items, to fetch subjects and authors only (since that's the beauty of NewsHopper's
offline capabilities), and to sort the threads alphabetically. However, with very low-
volume groups such as comp. sys. mac. announce and rec. humor. funny, I have
NewsWatcher bring in the articles themselves on the first pass, since it's easier.
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Neios 423
Group Settings
Name : recJnjmor.funny
rHF*tch:~
(•) All Nev Items
O A Maximum Of 1 100 Hev items
^ Fetch Subjects And Authors Only
Sort Threads Alphabetically
r~l Convert Articles To Latini
[ Cancel ] [( OK ]]
Figure 22.14 NezusHopper subscribe zoindoiv.
When you click the OK button, NewsHopper enters that newsgroup in your News
window. Frankly, this is all I've done for the way I use NewsHopper, because I know full
well which groups I want to read by now. However, if you don't know which groups you
want to read, you must tell NewsHopper to fetch the list of all groups, which requires
making a connection.
From the File menu, choose Connect, and in the dialog that appears, check the Fetch List
Of All Groups checkbox (see figure 12.15). Make sure you have a connection to the
Internet established if you're using SLIP or PPP, and then click the OK button.
NewsHopper goes out to your news server and brings in the full list of newsgroups (on
my server, with about 6,000 groups, NewsHopper brought in about 285K of data during
that time).
□ Fetch Neill articles
□ Fetch Marked References
n Send Hems In Outbasket
^ Fetch List Of Rll Groups
□ Rpply Filters
( Cancel ] [[ OK ^
Figure 22.15 NezusHopper Connect dialog.
There's not much that you can do in NewsHopper right now because you don't have any
groups configured yet, but if you did, you could be reading or replying to articles.
NewsHopper is extremely good about establishing connections and working in the
Part IV
Note
424 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
background, so you can keep reading. Once NewsHopper has finished, you can hang up
your Internet connection if you wish, and then choose List Of All Groups from the
Windows menu to bring up the window showing all the groups (see figure 22.16).
mm
list Of HU Groups
Subscribe...
Find:
ixnupva^a . rn uun
sys . PQC . advocacy
moc . announce
comp . sy s . mac . da tabases
comp . sgs . mac . d i gest
comp . sys . mac . games
comp . sys . mac . graph i cs
comp . sys . mac . harduore
. sys . mac . hordcar a . m I sc
comp . sys . mac . hordvare . u i deo
comp . sys . mac . hypercard
comp . sys . mac . m I sc
comp . sys . mac . oop . mocoppS
comp . sys . mac . oop . m i sc
comp . sys. mac . oop . tc I
comp.
comp
comp.
comp
comp.
comp.
comp,
sys . mac
sys . mac
sys . mac
sys. mac
sys . mac
sys . mac
sgs.moc
sys . mac
.printing
. programmer . codeuarr i or
. programmer . he i p
.programmer. info
. programmer . m i sc
. programmer . too i s
. sc i tech
Figure 22.16 NewsHopper List Of All Groups.
You can scroll around and select multiple groups, or you can type a search string in the
text field at the top and click the Find button. When you click the Subscribe button,
NewsHopper adds the selected groups to your News window.
NewsHopper makes you choose the options for all of the selected groups at the same time;
however, you can easily change the settings for how many articles to bring in, or whatever,
later by selecting the group in the Neu^s xuindow and choosing Settings from the Groups
menu.
So now that you've subscribed to a number of groups, let's fill them with articles. From
the File menu, choose Connect again. This time. Fetch List Of All Groups will have
changed (since you've already gotten the list) to Check For New Groups. Leave that
selected if you like, but also check Fetch New Articles. Make sure you're connected to the
Internet and click the OK button. NewsHopper connects to your news server and re-
trieves the subjects and authors for the articles in the newsgroups to which you've sub-
scribed (see figure 22.17).
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Neivs 425
' -'=^- — — - NGUIS — —
s@ii
Nevs on 'Achilles' (68 .7M available)
User : Adam C. Engst - Server : nevs.haiogon.com
Newsgroups Art
Ref
Size
oomp.sysinao .announce
3
IK
♦
comp .sy s jnac .oomm
748
165K
♦
comp.sysjnac.portab1es ~
362
79K
♦
comp .sgsjnao .system **
618
136K
♦
reciiumor.funny -
6
IK
♦
K
1109K !
1737
363K
Figure 22.17 NeiosHopper Nezos zoiridow.
Once it's done, you can again disconnect from the Internet — keeping your bills low if
you're charged by the hour or calling long distance. Even though NewsHopper moves
right along, if you've selected several high-volume groups, it can still take a while to
download just the subjects and authors. Be glad you aren't trying to download all of the
articles as well.
Basic Usage
To read articles in a newsgroup, simply double-click on the newsgroup in your News
window. NewsHopper brings up a window listing all the articles (see figure 22.18).
Remember that we don't yet have any of the articles themselves, just the subjects and
authors. So, the next step is to mark the articles you want to read. Double-clicking on an
article marks it with a checkbox, or you can select a number at a time and from the Articles
menu, use the Attributes hierarchical menu to choose Marked (K-M is a lot easier).
HiaJ ^ comp.sys.moc.comm
ilai
Display: | AH V'|
* ReiNew 14,4UUbpih AX Modem 3b9l
Andij Lesler
T7T47VS
• “O*
♦ New Group -> Group List in NewsHopper 1 .1 ??
Andy Cosiain
4/13/95
e
>/
Laurent Humbert
4/14/95
II
e
John DeHoog
4/15/95
♦
%/
Andy Costain
4/15/95
♦
%/
Peter Mulderry
4/15/95
♦
s/
Chris Abraham
4/15/95
e
s/
Mark Ha it am
4/16/95
♦
>/
Mark A. Chaffin
4/15/95
♦
x/
Barry Guyer
4/16/95
♦ Newsgroups/Netsoape/MacVeb/Mosaic/Eudora
•Peter V. Harris-
4/16/95
I
e
Chris Garrigues
4/16/95
* NewsHopper 1 .1 upgrade
x/
A J Harmar
4/17/95
♦
s/
Laurent Humbert
4/17/95
♦ Newsvalcher 437 error?
friley
4/17/95
♦
John Norstad
4/17/95
♦ Re : Newsvatcher FAQ?
Edward Floden
4/13/95
k
♦
James Gorham
4/12/95
’O'
■ RUlPxter.tfn
Figure 22.18 NezosHopper Articles zvindozv.
Part IV
Note
426 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
That's still a bit of work, though, so let's create some filters to do this for us. For instance, 1
want to read everything that Laurent Humbert posts, because he's likely to say interesting
things about NewsHopper, being the author. So, select an article from him, if you happen
to see one. Or, you could use the Find command from the Edit menu to search for his
name, at which point NewsHopper would display just the articles that match (you can
use the Display pop-up menu at the top of the window listing all the articles to switch
back to viewing all the articles).
After you have an article from Laurent selected, from the Articles menu choose Add Filter
For Author. NewsHopper brings up the Filter dialog box, mostly filled in for you (see
figure 22.19).
Figure 22.19 NewsHopper Filter window.
As you can see, you can search in the various parts of the article and either in specific
newsgroups or in all newsgroups via the pop-up Search In menu. Most important,
though, are the Delete, Highlight, and Mark For Download checkboxes. If you never want
to see anything from Laurent, you could check Delete. If you just want to see which
articles he's posted, you could just check Highlight and then, when you were browsing, it
would be easy to see his articles. However, if you want to read everything he posts, check
Mark For Download so his articles are automatically downloaded for you on the next
NewsHopper run.
Of course, you can create filters that work on variables other than the name of the poster,
although I find filtering on the posters' names to work well for me. Keywords in the Subject
lines always seem to bring in too much garbage for my tastes— perhaps I'm just not good
enough at creating them.
To actually apply the filters you've created (you can have NewsHopper do it automati-
cally for future runs), close the articles window, select one or more newsgroups in the
News window, and from the Groups menu choose Apply Filter.
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet News 427
After you've selected all the articles you want to download, either manually or through
filters, again choose Connect from the File menu, select Fetch Marked References (deselect
the others for the fastest run), connect to the Internet, and click on the button to make
NewsHopper go out and get the articles you marked. When it's done, disconnect from the
Internet and double-click on a group that has articles in it in the News window. You
probably still have all the article references listed that you didn't download; to hide those,
choose Articles from the Display pop-up menu at the top of the window. Finally, double-
click on an article in the list to bring up the article reading window (see figure 22.20).
Article Uleiuer Icomp.sys.mac.comml
ilai
Subject: Re: Nev Group -> Group List in NevsHopper 1 .1 ??
From: Laurent Humbert
Date. Fri, Apr 14, 1995
In article < RBB366C7966810BFB3Rcostain.demon.co.uk>,
ondyRcostain.demon.co.uk (Rndy Costain) wrote:
>1 are nou using NeusHopper 1.1 (which nay I sag Is an excellent package) and
>1 have downloaded a 'List of hew Groups' .
>
>1 are wonder whether or not there Is away to odd these new groups into the
>‘List of nil Groups' without having to download a complete new list of all
> groups.
hewsHopper should already have done that for you. Rfter checking for new
groups, the list is put in the ‘hew Groups' file and also appended to the
'List Of nil Groups' file. Isn't It the case ?
Speaking of version 1.1, all users having purchased hewsHopper should
downlood the upgrade package, released a couple of days ago:
f tp : //f tp . dereon . co . uk /pub /mac /newshopper /news-hopper- 1 1-updt . hqx
ftp.dereon.co.uk con refuse anonymous connections if it is very busy, and
you might have to try again.
It is highly recommended that all existing users upgrade to this version,
as 1.1 includes many new features and enhancements (runs native on
Powerhocs, internet Conf Ig-aware, new hewsFetcher, internal text editor,
on-the-f ly color f 1 1 tering ond more. . . >.
The evaluation package will also be upgraded to version 1.1 soon.
Laurent Humbert
SU1S Software
Figure 22.20 NewsHopper Article Viewer window.
NewsHopper has a spartan reading interface, and I hope Laurent adds some additional
navigation features in future versions. As it stands, the up and down arrow button in the
upper right-hand comer of the article window move you to the previous or next article,
and the Spacebar also takes you to the next article. There's no way to move to the next
thread if the current one proves boring, but you can delete it instantly with the Delete
Thread command in the Articles menu.
If you want to reply by email or forward the text to another person, those commands in
the Articles menu send the proper email address, the Subject, and the quoted text of the
article (or just the selection, if you don't want to quote the entire article) to Eudora. As
Part IV
428 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
with Nuntius, I think it makes sense to use Eudora's skills with email rather than trying to
duplicate the functionality in NewsHopper. In addition, that way all my outgoing replies
end up with the rest of my saved outgoing mail in Eudora.
Creating a follow-up is similar, but NewsHopper retains control, first asking you about
the Subject, newsgroup, and distribution, and then creating the follow-up in a separate
text window (see figure 22.21).
Distribution :
I world
•>B»for« Posting:
H Wordwrap Toxt
^ Append Signature
r~l Convert To Latini
In Queue
^ Delete After Posting
[ Cancel
] [[ Create^
Figure 22.21 NewsHopper follow-up windows.
Of course, just as with the rest of NewsHopper's features, the follow-up or any new
article, once you're done editing, is placed in an Outbasket and waits until you make
another connection.
Special Features
It's a little hard to point to special features in NewsHopper, because its main features,
offline newsreading and filtering, are so incredibly useful that they overshadow plenty of
other nice touches. For instance, NewsHopper is excellent about quoting only a selection
when you reply, forward, or follow up to an article, something that other programs such
as NewsWatcher and Eudora can do, but only as a modified command.
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Neivs 429
I appreciate the little Bytes Received status line at the bottom of NewsHopper's status
window because it gives me an idea of how much data I'm getting. Also, since I use a
dedicated Internet connection, I can't see the modem lights flashing to see that things are
working, so I appreciate the constant reminder.
As I said before, NewsHopper is excellent about multitasking, so you can continue to read
and reply to articles even as it's going out to retrieve more or to send your replies. This is
probably due to its support for Apple's Thread Manager, and folks with Power Macs will
appreciate the native code when filtering or performing other CPU-intensive tasks.
For people like me who are constantly seeing little useful bits of information,
NewsHopper has an Add To Clippings File command in the Edit menu. Choosing
Clippings File in the Windows menu brings up a small text editing window that shows
your clippings, separated by three bullets on a line.
If you want to save an entire article, consider clicking the little padlock icon in the lower
left-hand corner of the article window. That locks the article and prevents it from being
deleted later on.
Speaking of deletion, since you're downloading all these articles to your hard disk, you
will want to recover disk space at some point, and for that NewsHopper has a Purge
command that gets rid of uninteresting article references, articles you've read, articles that
you've extracted, archives, or just articles that have hung around for too long (see figure
22.22). Also, even purging the messages doesn't actually remove them from your newsfile
for efficiency reasons. For that, you should choose Compact from the File menu or let
NewsHopper do it when you quit.
r»oi^umor.funng
^ article References Not Marked For Douinlood
^ Rrticles That Haue Been Read
□ Rrticles That Haue Been EHtracted/Rrchiued
n Items Older Than Day(s)
E Keep Unread Rrticles
[ Cancel ] (j OK |
Figure 22.22 NewsHopper Purge dialog.
Although NewsHopper currently supports only FTP URLs (support for others is slated
for a minor upgrade soon), if you select an FTP URL and choose Create URL from the File
menu, it creates a bookmark file for use with Anarchie or Fetch. If you happen to be
online, hold down the Option key as you save the URL to have Anarchie or Fetch (as set
in Internet Config) resolve the URL immediately.
Pari IV
430 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
NewsHopper's Find command, which presents a restricted view of the messages available
in a newsgroup, works extremely well for the way I read news, since I often want to do
some ad hoc queries. It's too easy to be overwhelmed by several hundred messages in a
window.
Evaluation and Details
Overall, I'm extremely impressed with NewsHopper. Even though I use a dedicated
Internet connection now, I still read news with NewsHopper, mostly because of the
filtering and searching capabilities.
That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement, though. NewsHopper could still
use a more streamlined interface for actually reading news, with keyboard shortcuts for
movdng around in the threads. I'd also like to see it save bookmark files for MacWeb for
non-FTP URLs. And finally. I'd like to see the Find functionality move right into the
article list window itself, rather than be separated out in a different dialog. That way it
would be even easier to perform ad hoc searches for specific topics or posters.
NewsHopper's documentation is good, although I can't say that I've read most of it
because the program is fairly easy to figure out once you get the hang of the procedure for
doing something, connecting, disconnecting, doing something else, and repeating the
process all over again.
NewsHopper is commercial software (£39, with 20 percent educational discounts) from
SW15 Software, who you can contact at nh@sw1 5 . demon . co . uk or by phone in the U.K. at
(+44)-181 -813-6027 or (+44)-181-561-2879 (fax). Orders other than from the United States
and Canada should go to SW15 Software. In the U.S. and Canada, NewsHopper is distrib-
uted by LandWare for $59 (plus $4.50 shipping and handling via Priority Mail). You can
contact LandWare at landware@planet . net or at 800-526-3977, 201-347-0031, or 201-347-
0340 (fax). However, you can download a demo of NewsHopper 1.1 that is limited only
by being restricted to five newsgroups and not running in Power Mac-native mode. You
can get a copy of the latest version from:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
http://www.demon.co.uk/sw15/
Other News Programs
Despite the power and popularity of the preceding programs, several other newsreaders
might be worth checking out, although I don't feel that they are in the same league. In
addition, there are now two programs, MacSlurp and NewsFetcher, that act mostly as
news transport programs — they merely download messages for reading in another
program. Unless mentioned otherwise, all of the following programs are available in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet News 431
InterNews
InterNews from Dartmouth College provides yet
another interface for reading news, presenting you
with a three-paned window that displays a list of
newsgroups, a list of subjects in the selected group,
and the articles in a selected thread, all at the same
time. If you Command-Option-click on an FTP URL in a
message, InterNews can use Anarchie or Fetch to
retrieve the file. Unfortunately, InterNews doesn't yet
support other applications for resolving other types of
URLs. One relatively serious limitation in InterNews is
that you cannot receive or send an article larger than
32K. InterNews Is a fine effort, though, and much of
its interface is well done. InterNews is free for
educational and nonprofit users, $25 shareware for
others
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MacSlurp
MacSlurp works by connecting to a specified NNTP
server and downloading all the articles In the groups
that you specify in your slurp, sys file, which is a
specially formatted file that must live in your MacSlurp
RIes folder in your MacSlurp folder. Once MacSlurp
has downloaded all of the messages in a newsgroup,
you can set ToadNews to unbatch them (ToadNews Is
discussed in more detail in chapter 15, "UUCP
Access"), and once ToadNews has unbatched the
news articles, you can use rnMac or TheNews (again,
both discussed in chapter 15) to read the news.
MacSlurp can also download the news in a format that
UUCP/Connect can read, at which point you don't need
the combination of ToadNews and rnMac.
The major problem with MacSlurp (other than it doesn't
currently work with news servers like mine) is that it's
indiscriminate. If you ask it to retrieve
comp . sys . mac . comm, it goes out and downloads all
the articles in that group, regardless of whether or not
MacSlurp 1.5
Slurp ujos written by Stephen Hebditch
(steueh@orbitol.demon.co.uk)
Mac port and outgoing news by Tom
Oaules (tomd@horse.demon.co.uk)
f llJowl 1
it could take two hours because of all the new
messages. You must spend the downloading time and
have the disk storage space for all the articles, which
isn't efficient if you only wanted to read a few in that
group.
NewsFetcher
NewsFetcher is a free HyperCard-based news transport
agent from Jorg Shaffer. It's quite limited and a bit
clunky in terms of interface, but it provides a poten-
tially useful way of reading news offline. NewsFetcher
first retrieves subject lines in specified groups. You
then select the subjects you wish to read, and it goes
out and retrieves those articles. NewsFetcher doesn’t
attempt to read the articles on Its own at ail. but
instead saves them In a special format that Akif
Eyier's Easy View text browser (see the capsule review
in chapter 21, “Email") can read. Easy View Is a great
program for browsing text, although it would be nice If
coutimws
Part IV
432 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
NewsFetcher had an option for not downloading the
complete headers of the messages. NewsFetcher,
although it does have minimal posting capabilities, It
doesn’t work well if you post frequently. If you're more
of a lurker, though, NewsFetcher is fine. I won't
pretend that NewsFetcher is an Ideal offline
newsreading solution, but it is free.
FMC
i NewsFetcher Q.4.5 l
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NewsGrazer
NewsGrazer (which also seems to go by the names
NetNews RIter Agent and NetNews Grazer) is a free
set of AppleScripts from John Schettino that communi-
cate with an NNTP server, checking for new messages
in specified groups and scanning for search terms in
the subject lines of the messages. That’s actually the
task of the NetNews Grazer, whereas the NetNews
Grazer Prefs enable you to set various preferences,
and Read Interesting News provides a newsreading
interface patterned after InterNews. It gets the articles
that match your search string. NetNews Grazer can
also send you email whenever new articles arrive,
although that seems a little excessive to me. Perhaps
the main problem with NewsGrazer is its set of
requirements— it needs System 7 or later, AppleScript
1.1, FaceSpan 1.0, MacTCP, and the TCP/IP and
AppleScript 1.1 Scripting Additions. Just making sure
you have everything available Is too much work for
many people. John thought of that, and a $20
sDy NeuJsGrazer Freeuiare
3 Hems 595 MB in disk 35.2 MB 4v.
NetNevs Grarer Prefs runtime
NetNews Grazer runtime
Read interesting news runtime
7\
T1 IT
shareware payment gets you an electronic manual
along with AppleScript 1.1 and FaceSpan 1.0, as well
as the TCP/IP and AppleScript 1.1 Scripting Additions.
NNTP Sucker
Darrell Turner designed his $5 shareware NNTP Sucker
program to be almost exactly like MacSIurp, in that it
reads a Group file to see which groups you want to
download, and then it goes out and downloads
messages from those groups. You can’t specify which
messages to get, but you can set a maximum percent
or number of messages to retrieve. When NNTP Sucker
Is done, it can quit, restart the Mac, or shut down the
Mac. Like MacSIurp, NNTP Sucker creates output files
for use with ToadNews and then rnMac. NNTP Sucker
also works with a BBS program Darrell’s working on
called Pancake. Rnally, I’ve heard rumors that a new
version of NNTP Sucker might come out that can work
[OBl . . About NNTP Sucker...
NN
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out iwe from my
web peye.
with Easy View, an excellent text browser that’s much
easier to set up than ToadNews and mMac.
Chapter 22 ♦ Usenet Neios 433
TheNews
Bill Cramer’s $25 shareware newsreader, TheNews.
works by default in MacTCP mode, although it also
works with UUCP connections and with Unix shell
accounts. TheNews is a fairly basic newsreader, with
support for threads and the capability of using Eudora
to email responses and fonvard messages. Unfortu-
nately, I always seem to have various problems with
TheNews whenever I try to test it, and its interface
simply doesn’t compare to the main freeware and
shareware newsreaders. Feel free to try it out, but I
suspect you’ll prefer NewsWatcher, Nuntius, or
InterNews.
TheNews V2.30
A network r»»w* readtr
progrAm, written with
Thfcik C 7.0
Copyright ® 1990-95
- Bill Cromer
(cramer^cnromp net)
Sefvd comments end $25 to :
Bill Cromer
504 Vintervood Drive
Gropevine, TX 76051 USA
Value-Added NewsWatcher
Since John Norstad makes the code for NewsWatcher
available for anyone who wants it, there have been
various modified versions of NewsWatcher in the past.
One current and popular modification on the standard
NewsWatcher program comes from David Brewster and
Bob Boonstra. VA-NewsWatcher adds support for
posting binary files, rudimentary article filtering, and
article sorting. The last two of these features are likely
to be useful to many people, so I recommend you
check out VA-NewsWatcher. Do make sure you have
the latest version and that it’s in synch with John’s
official version. If possible, to avoid missing out on any
new features or bug fixes in the base code.
All the News That's Fit to Post
1 hope this chapter has given you a sense of how varied newsreaders can be, and how no
one can really decide for you which you'll like the best. I personally prefer NewsHopper
and NewsWatcher, but many people like Nuntius, and InterNews has a following as well
Any one of them should perform admirably for you, and if the one you try doesn't work
well, just switch to another.
Next, let's look at FTP programs like Anarchie and Fetch.
Part IV
Note
FTP
Although more people use email than any other Internet application, more data is trans-
ferred via FTP than any other Internet application. FTP is one of the base applications that
tie the Internet together. Despite its relative simplicity from a command line, FTP works
far better when you can use a graphical application to navigate through remote directo-
ries and files.
Keep in mind that a few machines-- ftp. apple, com, for one— don't allow you to log in if
you don't have a valid domain name, such as tidbits.com. Just having an IP number isn't
good enough; you must have a name associated with your number, or these sites bounce you
out for security reasons. Talk to your system administrator if you're bounced out
As in the previous sections, I cover the top applications in this area, and then address
some other utilities and such that may make your use of FTP better. There are a number
of FTP clients available, ranging from an early HyperCard stack (which I remember as
being astonishingly cool at the time) to Anarchie and Fetch, the de facto standards in the
MacTCP world. I look primarily at Anarchie and Fetch because I think they're the best,
but 1 briefly discuss some of the other FTP programs that I know about. Also, I've in-
cluded Anarchie 1.5 on the disk, complete with all sorts of bookmarks for interesting
places and files.
Note Note
436 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Many people use Web browsers for FTP because they can, but I often receive complaints
about how the Web broxoser doesn't do this or that. My answer is simply to put axoay the
silly Web browser and use Anarchie. Web browsers may have many talents, but they don't
even begin to compare ivith Anarchie for FTP.
Anarchie
For most people, Peter Lewis's Anarchie is quite simply the best FTP client available for
any platform. Not only is it fast, easy to use, and cleanly implemented, but it also does
something that Tve wanted for quite some time. Anarchie is a full-fledged FTP client, but
it can also search Archie ser\^ers for files stored on anonymous FTP sites. Once it has found
those files, it can retrieve them via FTP with merely a double-click.
Anarchie is pronounced like the word "anarchy," not like the phrase, "an archie," That's the
word direct from Peter.
Installation and Setup
You can place Anarchie anywhere on your hard disk, but its folder of bookmarks of
popular sites should stay in the same folder as the Anarchie program.
If you're using SLIP or PPP, make sure you're connected, and then launch Anarchie (or
else it will open the connection for you, even before you connect to a site). First, go to the
Edit menu and choose Preferences. Notice that there are hardly any preferences (see
figure 23.1). That's because Anarchie relies entirely on Internet Config, another one of
Peter's programs, for all of its common preferences. Since Tve also included Internet
Config on the disk, that shouldn't be a problem. Just look for the Internet Config section
at the beginning of chapter 27, "Utilities & Miscellany."
I recommend that you keep Post Process Files selected, since it enables Anarchie to use
Stuffit Expander to debinhex and expand files that you download automatically. In
Internet Config, you must set your email address, because Anarchie uses your email
address as the password when you connect to any anonymous FTP site.
Unless you know that you're behind a firewall (an Internet machine that makes entry into,
and often out of, a domain difficult), you shouldn't have to mess with the Firewalls item
in the Edit menu. If you are behind a firewall, contact your system administrator and ask
about how to work with your organization's firewall.
Chapter 23 ♦ FTP 437
imm
Preferences
d
Launch Internet Config ]
□ Open Archie UJindoiu at Startup
□ List Bookmarks at Startup
Post Process Files
^ Beep on Completion
Country Code: |us |
[3 I Paid [ Cancel ] [( Saue ]j
Figure 23.1 Anarchie Preferences window.
Basic Usage
There are a number of ways to use Anarchie, depending on what you want to accomplish.
If you want to browse around a site listed among Anarchie's bookmarks, choose List
Bookmarks from the File menu and double-click on one of them. As you can see, Peter
included a large list of the most popular FTP sites for various pieces of Macintosh soft-
ware (see figure 23.2). The list actually scrolls on for some time — there was no way to
show all of the bookmarks Peter includes.
-- .. ..1
^ Bookmorks
mmu
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-
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ftpbio.bgsu.edu
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f tp . amug org
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D fiOCE
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f tp . andrew . emu . edu
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D ROL
-
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-
-
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D flppi* Ruslin
-
-
1
ftp. oust in. apple con
O Rppla Businttis Sgstcns
-
-
1
abs apple con
CD RppI* Claris
-
-
t
ftp.claris.com
■'ii
CD RppI* Dulan
-
-
1
f tp . canbr i dge . app 1 e con
D Rppis Info
-
-
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ftp. info. apple. con
D Rppitt Stftding
-
-
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seed i ng . app 1 e . con
ill
CD Rppla Support
-
-
1
f tp . support . app 1 e . con
D f^pIsScrlpts
-
-
1
goea kgs . ukans . edu
’ i i
CD Bare Bones (Nelcoo)
-
-
1
ftp.netcom.con
CD Bare Bones <STD>
-
-
1
ftp.std.con
CD Dortikouth Col lege
-
-
1
f tp . dar tnouth . edu
CD Disinfectant
-
-
1
f tp . aens . nou . edu
CD Dylon
-
-
1
f tp . canbr 1 dge apple.com
D Electronic Frontier Foundation
-
1
f tp.eff .org
>11
D Eudora
-
-
1
f tp . qua 1 conn . com
CD FRQs < France)
-
-
5
grasp 1 . un 1 V- 1 yon 1 . fr
§
CD FRQf <0ernony>
-
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f tp un i -paderborn . de
i jj
D FRQs (Sweeden)
-
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ftp sunet se
CD FRQs (Taiwan)
-
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5
nc tuccca . edu . tw
CD French Uersions
-
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f tp sr i . uc 1 . ac . be
D GNU FTP Site
-
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1
f tp gnu . a i .nit edu
CD Gutenberg
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mrenex t . cso . u i uc . edu
h
a
Figure 23.2 Anarchie Bookmarks window.
If you double-click on one of the bookmarks, Anarchie connects to the remote site and
displays the directory listing. Double-clicking on names with folders next to them takes
Part IV
Note
438 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
you into that directory, and double-clicking on a file retrieves the file. In this respect,
Anarchie resembles the Finder in Name view.
But what if you want to retrieve a specific file that someone has told you about? Go to the
FTP menu and choose Get. Anarchie opens the Get via FTP window, which provides
fields for the name of the FTP host and the pathname of the file. If you don't know the
name of the file but do know the pathname to it, you can click on Get Listing instead of
Get File, at which point Anarchie connects to the FTP site and displays the directory
listing you've asked for. If you provide the full pathname of the file (including the
filename), select Get File, and click the Get button, Anarchie retrieves the file with no fuss
(see figure 23.3).
Get uia FTP ;
Machine:
Path:
Username:
Passmord:
ftp.tidblts.com
/pub/tldblts/tisk/tcp/anarchie- 1 S.hqH
O Get Listing (Username and Passmord blank for anonymous FTP)
(i> Get File
OUiemFile [ Cancel ] [ Saue ] |( Get |
O IndeH Search
Fig^ire 23.3 Anarchie Get via FTP window.
Since some URLs contain the name of the FTP server and the full pathname for a file, you
can type or paste that information into Anarchie's Get via FTP window. Be aware that if the
file you want has been updated, Anarchie won't be able to retrieve it (since the filename will
have changed). At that point, simply remove the filename from the end of the pathname and
ask Anarchie to get a listing of the directory that file originally lived in to find the updated
program.
If you want to connect to an "anonymous" FTP server — that is, an FTP server that re-
quires a username and password — simply enter them in the appropriate fields in the Get
via FTP window. Anarchie does not display your password in clear text, nor does it ever
store your password in a URL or in the log. Peter implemented this for safety because it's
all too easy to copy a URL from your home site and send it to someone, and if the pass-
word were stored with the URL, you'd be handing it out to the world at large.
If you're retrieving a directory list instead of a file, select the Get Listing button and click
the List button in the Get via FTP window. This brings up an Anarchie directory list
window in which you can double-click on files to retrieve them and on folders to open
them (see figure 23.4).
Note
Chapter 23 ^ FTP 439
Figure 23 A Anarchie listing window.
You can have multiple listing windows open to multiple sites simultaneously, and from
them you can even download multiple files simultaneously by double-clicking them one
after another. However, if you select several files at once and choose Get from the FTP
menu or hit Return, Anarchie downloads them one after another.
Downloading multiple files at the same time often doesn't work well with overloaded FTP
sites, since Anarchie tries to log in once for each file you want and many sites won't allozv
that.
If you don't know where the file you want lives but you have an idea what it might be
called, you can try using an Archie server to find it, and this is where Anarchie shines.
Unfortunately, Archie servers are seemingly becoming less and less reliable and useful as
time passes, but they can still be worth trying. Go to the File menu and choose Archie.
Anarchie brings up the Find window with a field for the Archie server you want to search
(with a pop-up menu of all the known servers) and a field for the search term (see figure
23.5).
Rrchie
archie.internic.net
Seruer:
Find: Istuffit-eKpander
]a
® Sub-string (dehqn)
O Pattern (dehqH’^.hqn)
O Regular Eupr (dehqH.^X.hqn)
□ Case sensitiue
Matches:
too
Cancel I
Saue
Figure 23.5 Anarchie Archie window.
Part IV
Note
440 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You can set how many matches Anarchie asks for, and a checkbox forces the search to be
case-sensitive. Case-insensitive searches are generally safer than case-sensitive searches,
because you never know how the filename might be capitalized on an FTP site. You want
to leave the number of matches relatively low, certainly under 100. If you go above that,
not only are you stressing the Internet unnecessarily, but the search takes a lot longer to
process.
Lastly, you have the choice of three types of searches: Sub-string, Pattern, or Regular
Expression. A Substring search is a simple search — if, for instance, you want to find the
Macintosh Internet game Bolo, simply type bolo into the Find field. However, since there
are a lot of files out there with the word bolo in their filenames, you'll find far too many
files that aren't what you want.
If instead you switch to Pattern searching, you can use a wildcard such as ? (meaning "any
character") or * (meaning "any string of characters"). This would enable you to search for
bolo^.hqx, which would find any BinHex files whose names start with bolo and end with
.hqx.
Most people will never need anything more powerful than Pattern searcliing, but if you're
not most people, you can switch to Regular Expression searching. Regular expressions are
tremendously powerful, but they're also terribly confusing and hard to write. If you want
to find out more about them, Peter recommends looking at the man pages for ed, a Unix
text editor. For this you must log in to a Unix machine and type man ed at the prompt, so
don't worr)' about it if you don't know how to do that. I only occasionally use Pattern
searches, and mostly stick to Sub-string searches.
Special Features
Although using Anarchie is simple (when in doubt, double-click on something), Peter
added lots of neat features that come in handy — that's why this section is so long. For
even more information on Anarchie, System 7.5 users should check out the Anarchie
Guide file available under the Guide menu in the upper right corner of your screen, next
to the Applications menu. Peter's friend Quinn wrote the Anarchie Guide, and it's not
only excellent, it may have been the first AppleGuide support outside of Apple when
Peter shipped it with Anarchie 1.4.
Unfortunate!}/, there sirnph/ wasn't room on the ISKM disk to include the excellent Anarchie
Guide file, so Peter allowed me to include a "Get Anarchie Guide" bookmark instead. Orice
you have your Internet connection set up, just double-click that bookmark to retrieve the
Anarchie Guide (when you've got it, it must live in the same folder as Anarchic).
When you have a directory listing window showing, you can copy one or more of the
entries in URL format. This may seem minor, but if you've ever wanted to send someone
Chapter 23 ♦ FTP 441
a list of files in a specific directory, yoiril love this feature. If you hold down the Option
key when you choose Copy or press K-C, Anarchie copies the selected entries in URL
format but without the angle brackets at the beginning and end of the URL. Needless to
say, I used this feature heavily while writing this book, and I use it every week in prepar-
ing TidBlTS.
Anarchie's knowledge of URLs is even more useful than it seems. If you see a URL for a
file in TidBlTS or anywhere else on the Internet, you can copy that URL and paste it into
the Host field in Anarchie's Get via FTP window (Anarchie splits up the URL properly
between the fields). I use this feature all the time, since URLs are becoming the standard
way to tell someone where a file lives, and it's so easy to, say, copy a URL out of an email
message and paste it into Anarchie.
Of course, if you use one of the main newsreaders, you can simply Command-click (or
less commonly now. Option-click) on an FTP URL in those programs to have Anarchie
retrieve it automatically. This too is tremendously useful, and in all likelihood, this feature
will be migrating to Eudora in the future as well.
If you hold down the Control key before selecting the File menu, you see that some of the
menu items change. Most notably. Retry changes to Edit Retry, and Open Bookmark
changes to Edit Bookmark. This is handy, but what's even handier is that Control-clicking
on an item in any Anarchie list window displays a Get via FTP window with the informa-
tion from that item in it, ready for editing. Anarchie also supports many of the same
shortcuts that work in the Finder, so you can move up a level with Command-up arrow,
for instance.
In another feature copied from the Finder, if you hold down the Command key and click
on the name of an Anarchie listing window, Anarchie shows you the full path to that
window.
I mentioned Anarchie's Bookmarks window earlier, but I didn't note that you can create
your own bookmarks. They can point to an FTP site, a specific directory on an FTP site, or
a file available via anonymous FTP. So, if you find yourself visiting the same site or
directory frequently, simply select the appropriate entry in a directory listing window and
choose Save Bookmark from the File menu. If nothing is selected, Anarchie sets the
bookmark to the directory referenced by the window itself. Anarchie's bookmarks are
extremely useful for providing simple access to files on an FTP site, because double-
clicking on the bookmark file to open it automatically retriev^es the file that the bookmark
references. This is precisely how I created the Essential Bookmarks that I include on the
disk.
If you visit the same FTP sites over and over again, as I do, you may find Anarchie's Log
window useful. Anarchie records every directory listing and file retrieval action in a log
file. Selecting Show Log from Anarchie's Window menu displays the listing of all of these
actions, and double-clicking on one works just like double-clicking on any item in an
Anarchie window. So, if you retrieve a file from a certain directory and want to go back
there later on for another file, try the Log window.
Part IV
442 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Also under the Window menu is Show Transcript, which shows precisely what you
would see had you used a Unix shell account for FTP. The main advantage of this is that
Anarchie's normal error messages are terse, so if you want the full error (which usually
tells you that the FTP site in question cannot handle any more users at that time), look in
the Transcript window (see figure 23.6).
sIS Transcript - ■
3l
220 gr ind. l»ca .uiowa. «du FTP server <Uersion i»u-2.4<58) Thu May IQ 16:48:41 COT
19Q4> ready.
USER anonymous
S30-Sorry, there are too many anonymous users using the system at this
530-time. Please try again later. There is currently a limit of 10
530-anonymous users.
530 User anonymous access denied.
QUIT
^>1 [0
Figure 23.6 Anarchic Transcript window.
If you're running System 7.5 or later and have the Macintosh Drag and Drop extension
installed, you can use what Apple calls the Drag Manager with Anarchie. The Drag
Manager enables you to drag files from an Anarchie window to a Finder window or to
your desktop to download them.
You can drag files from the Finder into an Anarchie window that you've opened (you
must have upload access to the FTP site reflected in that window) to upload them.
Anarchie uses the suffix mappings from Internet Config to guess at how to upload files,
and it's worked properly with the files I've thrown at it, in terms of using ASCII or binary
uploads.
If you want to delete a file from an FTP site where you have access, simply drag it to the
Trash icon on your Finder's desktop. I cannot begin to tell you how unbelievably cool this
feature is.
New in Anarchie 1.5 is a Rename command in the FTP menu — it does what you would
expect: it lets you rename a file. The only trick is that Anarchie doesn't update the win-
dow you're looking at, so if you delete or rename a file, you must choose Retry from the
File menu to get a new look at what's in the window.
Anarchie is scriptable and recordable via Apple's AppleScript and UserLand's Frontier;
this opens up Internet file retrieval to some extremely necessary automation. Anarchie
supports Frontier's Menu Sharing and includes some Frontier stuff from Leonard
Rosenthol to get you started if you already own Frontier. Also included are some sample
AppleScript scripts for automating file downloads and the like.
By clicking the column names, you can sort any list in Anarchie by name, date, size, host,
and so on. Sorting by zone lets you see which hosts are probably closest to you and best to
use if a choice exists.
Note
Chapter 23 ^ FTP 443
Anarchic works in a stateless mode, which means that it doesn't keep the FTP connection
open unless it's actually transferring a file or a directory listing. This is an extremely
efficient way of using FTP (more like Gopher or the Web than FTP, in fact, because
Gopher and the Web also only keep the connection open while you're transferring data).
Anarchie's stateless mode does mean that you may be able to navigate into an FTP site but
then be rejected when you try to retrieve a file, because too many other people have logged in
while you were navigating around.
Finally, Anarchie's About box displays the number of searches you've made, the number
of files you've transferred, and the number of kilobytes you've transferred. Anarchic
translates this into a rating. I don't know how many levels there are, but I just hit Net
Destroyer (complete with a spoken congratulations from Anarchic) after doing 34
searches and 2,260 transfers for 198.3 MB of files. Some folks are higher, but I suspect
they're padding their totals. When he read that last comment, Peter accused me of just
being jealous. He's probably right.
Evaluation and Details
Anarchic is essential for your Internet tool kit. Despite the slowness and flakiness of
Archie servers and the continual problems with finding new files via Archie, Anarchic
has proven itself time and time again for me in the months I've used it. Do read the
documentation, because there are a number of tips and tricks that you won't otherwise
discover.
Anarchic costs $10. 1 strongly encourage you to pay for Anarchic if you find yourself
using it. It's an essential Internet tool, and we need to keep Peter happy so that he keeps
writing great programs and releasing them as freeware or shareware. Peter now works
with Kagi Shareware, a company which accepts shareware payments in a multitude of
forms for shareware authors and then pays the authors all but a small handling fee. You
can use the Register application, which Peter also wrote and which comes with Anarchic,
to easily pay for Anarchic through Kagi.
Anarchic is included on the disk that comes with this book, and you can retrieve the latest
version of Anarchic in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
FTP
Part IV
Note
444 Internet Starter Kit for Macmtosh
Fetch
Fetch comes to the Internet community from Jim Matthews of Dartmouth College, whose
programmers have been notably active in developing and distributing Macintosh soft-
ware over the years.
Fetch is one of the most long-lived MacTCP-based applications, and Jim continues to
update it, adding features and bringing Fetch up to speed with Power Mac-native code.
Fetch's most recent upgrade adds such useful features as multiple simultaneous connec-
tions to different sites (or to the same site with the Allow Duplicate Connections prefer-
ence selected), a new interface, drag and drop support, a new bookmark list reminiscent
of Anarchie's list, better firewall support, Internet Config support, and AppleScript
support.
Unfortunately, Fetch 3.0 wasn't quite finished as I write this, so there may be a few slight
changes in the interface.
Installation and Setup
When you first launch Fetch, it presents you with a New Connection dialog, and in fact, if
you want to enter things such as userid and password manually, you can use the program
right away. I do recommend that you configure the preferences first, though, since they
do some of the work for you. From the Customize menu, choose Preferences to see a
tabbed dialog that lets you set all of Fetch's preferences. However, you can satisfy your
basic needs by simply selecting the Use Internet Config button in the General tab of the
preferences. Click the OK button to close the Preferences dialog, quit Fetch, and launch it
again. When it comes back up, look in the Preference dialog again, and you'll see that
Fetch has snagged a bunch of preferences from Internet Config, such as your email
address and the location where you want downloads to be saved (see figure 23.7).
Of course, if you don't use Internet Config (and I strongly recommend that you do use it,
which is why I included it on the ISKM disk), you must go through and set all of Fetch's
options manually.
Chapter 23 ^ FTP 445
Figure 23.7 Fetch Preferences dialog.
Basic Usage
When you launch Fetch, it opens a New Connection dialog box that enables you to pick
an FTP site from a Shortcuts pop-up menu or type in the necessary information to connect
to a new one (see figure 23.8).
Figure 23.8 Fetch New Connection dialog.
In this dialog, you can enter the machine name to which you want to connect, your userid
(which is usually anonymous, and which can be left blank if so), your password (which
should be your full email address, and which can be left blank if you've entered it in
Fetch's Preferences dialog), and the directory in which you want to start on the remote
Part IV
Note
446 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
machine. Of course, if you're using Fetch to connect to a personal account on an Internet
machine, the userid is your userid and the password is whatever you've set it to. Al-
though many people use Fetch with their own accounts, anonymous FTP is by far the
most common usage.
Some sites are finicky about your email address when it's used as an anonymous FTP
passivord. A workaround might be to use your userid along with the @ sign (for example,
ace^)’-and nothing else. That forces the remote FTP server to figure out the machine name
and domain on its own, which sometimes works better.
New in Fetch 3.0 is a bookmark list window feature, and at launch Fetch automatically
opens a special bookmark list window called Fetch Shortcuts (see figure 23.9) that con-
tains the same items that are in the Shortcuts pop-up menu in the New Connection dialog.
Although the two features may seem redundant, Jim wanted to add a new way of dis-
playing shortcuts, but he didn't want to rip out the New Connection dialog that Fetch
users have been used to for years. You can create more of your own bookmark list win-
dows that don't show up automatically or have their contents in the Shortcuts pop-up
menu — it's a handy way of organizing infrequently used bookmarks.
Name
Size Date
Fetch Shortcuts
Host
Userid
Path
CD Apple ArcMvea
- -
ftp.apple.com
/dts/mac
I'r
CD Dartmouth Archives
- -
ftp.dartmouth.edu
/pub
CD Halcyon
- -
halcyon.com
tidbits
/archive/pub/tldbits/
D 1 nfo- Mac Archives (aumex-eim)
- -
sumex-alm.stanford edu
/I nfo-mac
CD Info- Mac mirror
- -
vuarchlve.wustl.edu
/mirrors/i nfo-mac
CD NCSA Archives
- -
ftp.ncsa.uluc.edu
/Mac
CD U. Michigan archives
—
mac.archlve.umlch.edu
/mac
CD vw .tidbits. com
- -
ww.tldb1ts.com
tidbits
pages
fl IliIMt,. 1 Mtn
- -
H|i tMt'ii . Miiii
o
Figure 23.9 Fetch Shortcuts window.
You could enter in connection information in the New Connection dialog each time you
connect to an FTP site, but that would be silly. Fetch enables you to add your own short-
cuts to the Shortcuts pop-up menu and the Fetch Shortcuts bookmark list with the New
Shortcut command in the Customize menu, which brings up a dialog for creating new
shortcuts. The New Shortcut menu item is visible whenever you don't have a bookmark
list window in front.
If a bookmark list window is in front, the New Shortcut menu item changes to New
Bookmark List Item. The two commands do essentially the same thing, but a shortcut
lives in the Fetch Shortcuts window and in the Shortcuts pop-up menu, whereas you can
add Bookmark List Items to any bookmark list window. To edit an existing shortcut, you
must select it in the bookmark list window and choose Edit Bookmark List Item from the
Customize menu — I prefer the shortcut, which is Option double-click (see figure 23.10).
Chapter 23 ^ FTP 447
Bookmark Editor
Shortcut: |
|ftp. tidbits. com
1
Type:
1 Folder
Host:
ftp.tidbits.com
1
User ID:
1
Passiuord:
Directury:
/pub/tidbits
1
f Cancel ] |
1 »K 11
Figure 23.10 Fetch Bookmark Editor.
In any event, you can connect to a site either by choosing a site from the New Connection
dialog's Shortcuts pop-up menu and clicking the OK button or by double-clicking on it in
a bookmark list window. Either way, Fetch then displays its main window, where you do
most of your work uploading and downloading (see figure 23.11). Fetch also displays a
message window for any automatic messages that the administrator of that server wants
you to read. You can leave the messages window open in the background, as I've done in
the screen shot, or you can close it to clean up your screen.
ftp. tiUbits.com messages
ftp.tidbits.com
Q m#ss49«
2K 01/09/95
Q dominiting-mjctcp...
63K 05/14/94
CD issues
- 03/13/95
CD mirror
- 03/13/95
CD mi5c
- 04/10/95
1 1 private
- 04/21/95
CD
- 04/21/95
1 1 Ihtwordbcok
- 03/13/95
CD
- 04/21/95
7\
[Put File..
[Get File..
(i) Rutomotic
OTCHt
O Binary
S<*tU5
Connected
□l£
IrMflK.
Jg
Figure 23.11 Fetch main window.
The main element in Fetch's window is the list of files and directories on the left side of
the window (although that list is, of course, empty until you connect). Above it and to the
left is a little open folder icon that you can drag over to a bookmark list window to save
the current directory as a bookmark. To the right of the file listing are two buttons that
Part IV
448 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
enable you to get or send (Put) a file. Under that are two radio buttons. Text and Binary,
with which you can indicate what sort of files you are transferring. A third button.
Automatic, lets Fetch try to determine the file type for you based on the file extension. Tve
stuck with Automatic almost entirely and haven't had any trouble, but you might need to
switch manually at some point if files are named strangely.
To the right of all the buttons is the status area. At the top of the feedback area under
Status, Fetch reports precisely what it's doing, such as "Connecting," "Changing dir,"
"Getting file list," and so on. Then comes the File section, which lists which file Fetch is
working on, what format it's in, and how large it is. Below that is the Transfer feedback
section, where Fetch reports how many bytes it has transferred along with the rate at
which it is transferring the file. New in Fetch 3.0 is a graphical pie display of how large
the file is and how much of it has been transferred. You can resize Fetch's main window
or place it anywhere on the screen.
If you've used the Mac for any length of time, you'll know how to use Fetch immediately.
You double-click on a directory (they have little folder icons) in the list to enter that
directory. Double-clicking on a file does the same thing as selecting the file with a single
click and then clicking on the Get File button. You can select contiguous multiple files by
Shift-clicking on them or multiple discontiguous files by Command-clicking on them, at
which point clicking on the Get File button snags the lot of them. After you click on the
Get File button, Fetch figures out what sort of file you're getting and either asks you to
save it with a standard Save File dialog box or automatically places it in a folder you've
defined in your Preferences.
Fetch now fully supports Apple's Drag Manager, so if you have System 7.5 and the
necessary Drag Manager extensions installed, you can drag files from Fetch's window to
the Finder to download them, to the Trash to delete them (assuming the site lets you do
that), and from the Finder to Fetch's window to upload them. The Drag Manager also
provides an easy way of making shortcuts — just drag a file or a folder from a Fetch
window into a bookmark list window.
When you download a file. Fetch can launch Stuffit Expander to process a downloaded
file (or launch the downloaded file itself, if it's a self-extracting application). If you've
used Internet Config, Fetch gets its post-processing settings from Internet Config.
Special Features
I especially like Fetch's View File command in the Remote menu because it displays text
files, which is useful for browsing through the README files that are ubiquitous on FTP
sites. Anarchie has a similar feature, but actually downloads a file and then opens it in the
word processor you choose, which works fine but leaves lots of files called README
lying around.
Chapter 23 ^ FTP 449
In the Directories menu. Fetch lists all of the directories you have visited, not only in that
session, but in the past for the current site as well. This is tremendously useful because
you tend to go back to the same places over and over again.
Fetch supports Anarchie's bookmarks so you can save and open them, which makes for a
nice interaction between the two. You can even drag an Anarchie bookmark file from the
Finder into one of Fetch's bookmark list windows to add it. Fetch accepts URLs pasted
into its New Connection dialog, and if you select a file or folder and choose Copy from
the Edit menu. Fetch places the appropriate URL in the clipboard.
Fetch now supports multiple connections to different sites at the same time, and although
it does support mulriple connections to the same site, it will reuse idle windows if pos-
sible rather than opening new ones.
You can now sort the items in Fetch's listing windows by clicking on the titles of the
various columns. I use this a lot for seeing which files have been uploaded to a site most
recently.
If you have access to your own account via FTP, you can use Fetch to create and remove
directories, rename files, and even issue raw FTP commands. These features won't help
the average user of anonymous FTP, but for someone managing their own account, this
kind of control is useful. I especially like being able to have Fetch issue a LIST -R com-
mand that lists the entire contents of a site under the current directory.
Finally, although this feature is hard to quantify. Fetch seems to be the most solid of all
the FTP clients at connecting to and working with strange FTP servers. Every now and
then I hit one that Anarchie won't handle, and Fetch always works fine, especially when
uploading.
Evaluation and Details
How does Fetch compare to Anardiie? I like and use both programs on a regular basis,
but at this point I mostly use Fetch for maintaining files on my account. I use it exclu-
sively to manage ftp . tidbits . com, and it's been a godsend. However, I find that when
I'm looking for a file or browsing FTP sites, I prefer Anarchie, mostly because of its
multiple windows to the same site and ease of use. Even though Fetch now has multiple
connections, it can't open multiple windows to the same site or have multiple downloads
from different parts of the same site going at the same time. Mostly because of the single-
window approach, you don't use Fetch to explore — you use it to get your work done. It
performs admirably, especially if your work involves a fair amount of uploading. Of
course, one of the best parts about Fetch is its running dog cursor, but that you must see
for yourself.
Educational institutions and nonprofit organizations may use Fetch free of charge, and
everyone else can license it from Dartmouth for $25. Read the Fetch Help for more
Part IV
450 Ijjternet Starter Kit for Macintosh
information about licensing. You can retrieve the latest version of Fetch via FTP in any of
the following:
http : / /v/ww . dartmouth . edu/pages/ sof tdev/f etch . html
ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/mac/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Other FTP Programs
Although Anarchie and Fetch are the acknowledged standards for FTP clients on the net,
several others exist, although they're not widely used, with the possible exception of
Snatcher, from Software Ventures. I've removed information about Xferit and HyperFTP,
mostly because they're so old and completely ignored that I'm not even sure if they'll
work with most modern systems. Although both are still available on the Internet, don't
bother checking them out for anything but a historical lesson. Also ignored is a program
called MacFSP, which is a client for a different file transfer protocol called FSP that is
barely used anywhere. Finally, I'm also not including information here about Communi-
cations Toolbox FTP tools, since 1 basically don't see the point in using them — if you can
use an FTP tool, you can use Anarchie. Unless I give a separate URL, the programs
mentioned below are in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
EasyTransfer
Although Christopher Reid’s $10 shareware
EasyTransfer is not exactly an FTP program because
It doesn’t use the same protocols as FTP and cannot
be used as a client, I thought I’d mention It quickly for
those who want to transfer files between two Macs,
both of which run MacTCP and are on the Internet.
EasyTransfer works as both a server and a client,
and enables you to set up specific folders that only
certain users can access. There’s nothing fancy
about EasyTransfer, but I suspect that’s the point,
since you may not want to mess with setting up a full
FTP server just to move a few files.
Thanks for urt»>g CasyTransftr. EuyTransftr If ©1992-93 Christopher Raid
EasyTransfer is Share^irare and the single user registration fee is US$20. Site
licences are also available. Please ocntaoi me by e-mail for further
information. Unfortunately I can't accept cheques unless they are a) made out in
pounds sterling, or b) a US$15 handling charge is added. The same applies to
international postal money orders. Cash (whatever the equivalent of US$20 is)
is welcome in any ourrenoy . Please send your registration fee to :
Christopher Reid
Rat T2
Clarendon Court
9 Clarendon Place
Glasgow, 020 7PZ
Scotland
For latest version of EasyTransfer, see
ftp://mae-flp.os.strath.ao.ak/naestuff/EasyTransfer/
Please feel free to oontaot me at any time by e-mail (cr^es.strath.acAjk) If you
experience any problems with the software, or If you would like particular
features added.
Chapter 23 ^ FTP 451
FTPd
FTPd, another $10 shareware application from Peter
Lewis, enables you to make a Macintosh with a
dedicated Internet connection into an FTP and
Gopher server. Not surprisingly for a server, It has a
somewhat complex setup procedure, but to simplify
matters, it uses System 7 File Sharing to create
users and groups and assign access privileges.
Once it’s running as a foreground or background
application, anyone on the Internet can use FTP or
Gopher to look around on your Mac. If you allow FTP
access and don’t set your File Sharing privileges
correctly, people also can copy and delete files at will,
so be careful when you’re running FTPd. I’ve used
FTPd on an SE/30 to create FTP and Gopher servers,
and I’m impressed at how well FTPd works, especially
for the price and the age of the hardware.
~ riPd Setup ^
'I'
m* s*tup
CB
FTP Uf*r(
eg]
Stcurity
1^
OofhM’ S*lup
Oofhtr OIri
m
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FTPShare
FTPShare, a $170 commercial product from About
Software Corporation (ASC), provides much the
same capabilities as FTPd In terms of using it to run
an FTP server. FTPShare has four pieces: a setup
application, a monitoring application, an application
to define user profiles, and an extension that
presumably does most of the work, since none of the
applications need be open for FTPShare to work.
FTPShare supports up to 20 simultaneous clients and
claims that it works well in the background. For more
Information on FTPShare, contact ASC at
f tpshare^ascus . com or by phone at 800-55-
SOFTWARE, 408-725-4242, or 408-725-4243 (fax).
There’s a demo of FPShare available as well.
ftp://ftp.ascus.com/mac/demos/
Snatcher
Snatcher, from Software Ventures, Is the first
commercial stand-alone FTP program that I’ve seen.
Its primary goal is to look as much like the Macintosh
Finder as possible. Snatcher can download multiple
files from different sites at the same time, although
they all show up in the queue of the single Session
Progress window. I gather that Snatcher is extremely
easy to script if you already know how to script the
Finder with AppleScript. Snatcher Is a good program,
possibly even a very good program. Its main problem
is that it’s up against another program. Anarchie, that
is cheaper, shareware (so you can try it before you pay
Peter), easier to use, and more powerful. The few
tasks that Snatcher can do that Anarchie cannot, such
FTP
Part IV
452 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
as downloading an entire directory, aren’t all that
common. Snatcher comes with Microphone Pro, and
you can get it separately for less than $50 from
Software Ventures. For more information about
Snatcher, send email to snatcher@svcdudes.com
or call 510-644-3232 or 510-8480885 (fax).
Session Progress E
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Finalizing FTP
The Web may be the hottest thing on the Internet right now, but frankly, I spend far more
time downloading files via FTP, usually in Anarchie. I also do a fair amount of uploading,
usually in Fetch, and all I can say is that you should use one of these programs. Web
browsers just don't do FTP well right now.
But enough about FTP! Let's move on to another method of retrieving data, Gopher.
Gopher
The University of Minnesota's Gopher system is an inherently list-based Internet service
that provides access to large quanties of information. Because of this, it maps perfectly
to separate windows of lists, between which you can switch back and forth, clicking on
interesting items to explore deeper in Gopherspace. And thus, this is the technique used
by the most commonly used Gopher client, TurboGopher, which was written by the same
folks who created the entire Gopher system. However, with the ascendancy of the World
Wide Web, more people probably access Gopher servers via the single-window Web
browsers like MaeWeb than via TurboGopher, just because it's easier not to launch
another program. That's not to say that TurboGopher still doesn't have its uses. If you
mainly use Gopher servers, TurboGopher still feels much faster than the Web browsers,
and its multiple window approach often works better as well.
TurboGopher
The primary reasons for TurboGopher's popularity are that it comes from the developers
of Gopher at the University of Minnesota and that it has the fastest perceived speed
(especially over slow modem links) of any Gopher client available for any platform.
Basic Usage
TurboGopher comes configured out of the box, so to speak, to point at the Home Gopher
server at the University of Minnesota. Actually, that's not entirely true of the most recent
version, TurboGopher 2.0, which may require a minimal setup process. TurboGopher 2.0
Note
454 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
requires Apple's Thread Manager, which comes with System 7.5. However, if you don't
use System 7.5 (TurboGopher requires System 7.0 or later) you must drop the Thread
Manager extension that comes with TurboGopher in your Extensions folder into the
System Folder. Restart, and then you're ready to run TurboGopher.
Double-clicking on the TurboGopher icon launches the program. At this point it connects
to the Home Gopher server and displays the main menu in the Home Gopher Server
window (see figure 24.1), along with windows for your Bookmark Worksheet and the
TurboGopher Help (only the first time you launch the program).
Rnnkmnrk llinrkshnpt 1
rUf ^ . _ . . J Home Gopher 1 ^
L
c
CD Information About Gopher
C
Cd Computer Information
C
Cll Discussion Groups
C
CD Pun 8^ Games
c
CD Internet file server (ftp) sites
c
CDLIhraries
c
CD News
c
CD Other Gopher and Information Servers
D
CD Phone Books
D
(3 Search Gopher Titles at the University of Minnesota
G] Search lots of places at the University of Minnesota
Cd University of Minnesota Campus Information
0
®l991-95Unly#r»1lg ofMlnnfioU.
Figure 24.1 TurboGopher Home and Bookmark Worksheet windozvs.
Behind the Home Gopher Server window is the Bookmark Worksheet window, which
holds your personal bookmarks to other sites or items available via Gopher. You can
create bookmarks by selecting an item and choosing Copy (or pressing K-C) from the
Edit menu and then pasting (or pressing 3t-V) the item into the Bookmark Worksheet
window.
You can save a bookmark file (use the Save As command in the File menu) that points at a
specific folder in Gopherspace. If you then double-click on that file to launch TurboGopher
rather than double-clicking on the program itself TurboGopher won't automatically connect
to the Home Gopher Server, but instead connects to the site listed in your bookmark file.
Let's browse around a bit so that you can get a feel for navigation in Gopherspace; it's
really very easy. Double-click on the "Information About Gopher" item to open that
window. Next, double-click on "Gopher Software Distribution" to move into that area.
Finally, click the "Macintosh-TurboGopher" item, and in there, double-click
"OOREADME" to open that document for reading (see figure 24.2).
Chapter 24 ♦ Gopher 455
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Documentation for TurOoGopher is Included inside the eppllcatlon.
Select the Help Item from the Gopher menu
To convert old Gookmerks (from 1 0 8 etc), save the Bookmarks
In a Bookmark file using 1 0.8. Then launch 2.0 and select
Open from the File menu while holding down the Option Key.
You will he able to open the old Bookmark file and it will he
converted to the new kind
You also should get a complete suite of Helper Applications which
ore Included with the TurboCopher distribution from
boombox mlcro.umn.edu (look In the helper-oppllcotlons directory).
AcrobatReoder2.0.hqx for viewing PDF files
Anarchle-IAO.sIt.hqx for resolving ftp URLs
01991-95 UntvtrrH^ af
-rrrrr
Figure 24.2 Browsing through Gopherspace.
If you wanted to download a copy of TurboGopher (or any other program indicated
by a disk icon), you could close the "OOREADME" window, double-click on the
'TurboGopher2.0.sea.hqx" item, and TurboGopher would download it for you. If you do
download a file, TurboGopher can download while you continue to explore Gopherspace,
although it does take a little longer for windows to open and text files to display. When
a download is complete, you can click the resulting Open button to open the file just as
though you had double-clicked on it in the Finder. TurboGopher can automatically
debinhex files, but recommends setting Stuffit Expander as the helper application for
BinHex files. Therefore, clicking the Open button both debinhexes and expands the file.
In addition to the disk icon that indicates a downloadable file, TurboGopher may display
a number of other icons next to the items in the lists. Most common, of course, is the
folder, followed by the text file icon. Double-clicking on a text file displays it immediately.
The question mark icon brings up a simple search dialog that lets you, for example, enter
one or more words to search for in a full-text database. Some icons indicate file types.
There's one that looks like a starburst and identifies a GIF image, a speaker that marks
sampled sounds, another that denotes QuickTime movies, and one that indicates a DOS
program. You also may see an icon that looks like a Mac Plus; it indicates that the service
is terminal-based and launches NCSA Telnet for you if you double-click on it.
TurboGopher 2.0 uses a number of helper applications like NCSA Telnet, so by default it
hands off HTTP URLs to MacWeb, FTP URLs to Anarchic, NNTP URLs to NewsWatcher,
and Ph URLs to Ph (a phone directory application from John Norstad). In addition,
TurboGopher uses JPEGView to display images you download.
As you may realize, Gopherspace is huge, and although Gopherspace is highly linked,
more so even than the Web, it can be confusing to browse through manually. The tool that
makes navigating Gopherspace possible is Veronica, which enables searches of either only
Gopher directories or of all items in Gopherspace (see figure 24.3).
PartIV
Note
456 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
] Search fn Bophertpace using ueronica d
G] Find GOPHER DIRECTORIES by Title word(B) (vio NYEERNet}
U] Find GOPHER DIRECTORIES by Title WDrd(s) (via PSINet}
0 Find GOPHER DIRECTORIES by Title word(e) (via SUNET)
0 Find GOPHER DIRECTCRIES by Title word(s) (via U. of ManlloDa)
0 Find GOPHER DIRECTCRIES by Title word(s) (via UNINETT/u. Of Bergen)
0 Find GOPHER DIRECTCRIES by Title won)(s) (via University of Koein)
0 Find GOPHER DIRECTCRIES by Title worc(e? (via University of Plea)
• 'liienil'. -Ailed Oueslicns i AQ) about veronico *
B) How to Comocse veronica Queries * June 23. 1994
CD More veronico Software. inseic-Control Protocol. HTML Pages
0 Searcn CocherSpace by Title wcrd(s) (via NYSERNet)
0 Search GopherSpace by Title wcrd(e) (via PSINet)
0 Search GopherSpace by Title wcrd(s) (via SUNET)
0 Search GopherSpace by Title word(s) (via U, of Manitoba)
0 Search GopherSpace by Title word(s} (via UNiNETT/U. of Bergen)
0 Search GopherSpace by Title word(s) (via University of Koein)
0 Search GopherSpace by Title word(e) (vie University of Pisa)
Simplified veronica chooses server - pick a search type;
0 Simplified veronica: Find Gopher MENUS only
0 Simplified veronica: find ALL gopher types
Figure 24.3 TiirhoGopher and Veronica.
You can generally find Veronica under "Other Gopher and Information Servers/' or
perhaps under a folder called "World," but whatever you do, make sure that you have
a bookmark to both types of Veronica searches. The new simplified Veronica search tries
a number of Veronica servers in a row, because they're often overloaded and refuse
connections.
Ififou read the FAQ in the Veronica folder, it tells you about a number of useful features in
Veronica that you'd never know otherwise, such as using the -t7 szoitch in a search string to
fmd only searchable items.
If someone tells you to check something on a specific Gopher site, you can jump directly
to it. From the Gopher menu select Another Gopher, and in the Domain Name field type
the Internet address of the Gopher site to which you want to connect (see figure 24.4).
Domain Nome gophBr.seettle.mo.us
PoM 70
( More Choices ] [ Cencei ]
Figure 24.4 TurboGopher Another Gopher dialog.
These days, though, people often trade URLs, not just names of servers, and TurboGopher
also can deal fairly well with URLs. From the Gopher menu, choose Use Uniform Re-
source Locator, and in the dialog box that appears, paste or type in a URL. If it's a Gopher
Note
Chapter 24 ♦ Gopher 457
URL, TurboGopher goes directly to that site. If the URL is for news, FTP, the Web, or Ph,
instead, TurboGopher passes it off to the appropriate helper application.
Special Features
If you hold down the Control key while clicking an item in a Gopher list, TurboGopher
displays a pop-up menu containing information about that item. It's a quick way of
determining where a file is, its URL, and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, not included in
the pop-up display is the size of a file; for that, you must choose Get Attribute Informa-
tion & URL from the Gopher menu and look toward the bottom of a badly formatted list
of information.
Just seeing a URL isn't all that helpful, so if you want to copy a URL as you would in
Anarchie or Fetch, hold down the Option key and choose Copy from the Edit menu. Unfortu-
nately, K-Option-C doesn't do anything, even though it's the same as holding down Option
while selecting Copy.
One of TurboGopher's major speed increases comes from its capability to let you start
reading a document while it's being retrieved. Although this capability doesn't actually
speed up execution, it reduces the time you wait for the program, which is all-important.
To aid in navigation, you can optionally have TurboGopher reuse the same window
rather than open a new one each time. This capability prevents window clutter, although
it may make moving around more confusing. Also, a Recent menu lists all the places
you've visited, in reverse chronological order; selecting any item from this menu takes
you there instantly. If you end up in a window with a large number of items, you can type
the first few letters of a name to move directly to it, or you can use TurboGopher's Find
feature, available from the Edit menu. Arrow keys work fine for navigation, along with
the Return or Enter key for moving into an item.
Evaluation & Details
TurboGopher is fast and easy to use, and for heavy use of Gopherspace, it's better than
using a Web browser. Although TurboGopher 2.0 cooperates well with the other main
Internet programs, I found it to be fairly flaky at times. Once or twice its capability to
display and copy URLs gave thoroughly incorrect information, and I had some trouble
getting it to pass URLs properly when it was low on memor)^ If you're just using the
occasional Gopher server, especially if you connect to it from a Web server, a Web
browser is probably a better choice than firing up TurboGopher. But, I'll keep
TurboGopher around for when I need to burrow deep into Gopherspace for some
piece of information.
TurboGopher is free for noncommercial use (commercial use requires permission — ask at
gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu). The most recent release of TurboGopher is always
available from the University of Minnesota Gopher server, and at either of the following:
Part IV
458 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp : / / boombox . micro . umn . edu / pub/gopher/Macintosh -TurboGopher/
Other Gopher Clients
Although I only recommend that you use TurboGopher (or one of the Web browsers) for
accessing Gopher servers, there are a couple of other Gopher-related programs out there.
There were originally a few more clients, including GopherApp, MacGopher, and Sextant,
but they haven't been updated in so many years that 1 can't even justify using space in the
book on them, much less recommending that you check them out. Unless I note other-
wise, the following applications can be found in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Blue Skies
Although actually a Gopher client, Blue Skies, free from
the University of Michigan’s Weather Underground’s
Alan Steremberg, is primarily a neat application for,
well, Interacting with the weather. You need not go
outside or travel to other parts of the world, though.
All you must do is launch Blue Skies and select
Groundhog Sen/er from the Groundhog menu. I
especially like the interactive weather maps, which
bring up a map of the United States. Moving your
mouse over different locations on the map displays the
weather conditions for that city. You can even zoom in
and out to a few different magnifications, and in doing
so gain access to more detailed weather data.
GopherSurfer
You have two options if you want to set up a Gopher
server on a Mac. I mentioned Peter Lewis’s FTPd in the
previous chapter, and the University of Minnesota also
has a Gopher server called GopherSurfer. GopherSurfer
can work with AppleSearch, Apple’s heavy-duty (it
requires a 6804Obased Macintosh) searching engine.
So, if you are serious about setting up a searchable
Gopher server on a Mac, check out the combination
of GopherSurfer and AppleSearch. Like TurboGopher,
GopherSurfer is free for noncommercial use-
commercial organizations should contact the Gopher
team at the University of Minnesota.
ftp : / / boombox . micro . umn . edu / pub/gopher/Mac_server/
Chapter 24 ♦ Gopher 459
PNLInfo Browser
The free PNLInfo Browser is a somewhat interesting
Gopher client because it uses a hierarchical outline
view much like the Finder's Name view. Clicking a
triangle expands the outline, although because it must
retrieve the new information from the remote Gopher
server. PNLInfo Browser doesn’t feel snappy. It can
display abstracts for Gopher Items that describe what
that Item is in more detail. Also interesting is PNLInfo
Browser’s subscription feature, which can notify you of
items that have changed since you last viewed them.
Brouiter PNL Homo r.V .
i:
C]
1 PNL Momi
@ Wilcama ta PNL
D Daltallt PNL. Mala Campus
t>
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ad tauoawnN progrsn
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Caratructloa)
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TurboGopher VR
The Power Mac-only TurboGopher VR, from the
University of Minnesota Gopher Team, is best described
as the unholy marriage of Spectre (the 3D tank game
from Velocity Development) and TurboGopher. Actually,
I think TurboGopher VR Is extremely cool — whenever
you enter a new Gopher menu. TurboGopher VR drops
you with a thud Into a Spectre-like three-dimensional
scene containing what look a bit like stone monoliths
littering the countryside. Roll up to one and you can
read its title (the same as you’d see in one of
TurboGopher’s normal text lists) and click on It to go
into It. A central spire lets you zip back up In the
hierarchy. I can't say that It’s useful, and it’s probably
bu gg y as all get out, but if you’ve got a Power Mac, you
simply must check out TurboGopher VR.
Q] Storcn »*imer
a O0«EA&f1£
a Ailct in iMii Long
a Backyvsodi £u«lon
SoptiercpsceDR ~
, uir gj
/Berblpw
S^oHumor ,
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ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edU//pub/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/TurboGopherVR/
The Closing Gopher Holes
Although Gopher usage is decidedly on the wane thanks to the popularity of the World
Wide Web, there is still a great deal of information available in Gopherspace. It's simply
easier to publish via Gopher than via the Web, and as a result, sometimes it makes sense
to use a dedicated Gopher client instead of a Web browser to access Gopher servers. Take
your pick.
In the next chapter, "World Wide Web," I'll look at the main Web browsers, one of which,
MacWeb, comes on the ISKNI disk for you to use. After you've had a chance to check out
Gopherspace with MacWeb, try downloading a copy of TurboGopher and try it that way
as well so you can make up your mind about which you like better.
Part IV
World Wide Web
When I wrote the first edition of this book, the World Wide Web was just starting to
explode and the Macintosh was being left out. Then, along came NCSA Mosaic for the
Macintosh and all was well in the world. Since that time (fall of 1993), the World Wide
Web has propelled the Internet into the eyes of the public. "Check out my home page
at..." has become a common phrase, and the amount of information that appears every
day on the Web is staggering.
Despite the fact that the Web was developed at CERN, in Switzerland, NCSA Mosaic
deserves a good deal of credit for popularizing the Web. NCSA had the resources to
create Mosaic and to give it away, and although it wasn't a particularly good program at
that point, it was enough to entice people to use and publish information on the Web.
Of course, any success demands to be copied or even exceeded, and that's where the other
major Web browsers came from. First was MacWeb, from the EINet group of MCC, and
then came Netscape, developed by many of the same programmers who had created
Mosaic while at NCSA. Then, NCSA, via a company called Spyglass, licensed the Mosaic
code to a variety of companies that have produced versions of Enhanced Mosaic that
differ little from the first versions of NCSA Mosaic. Most recently (and discussed in
chapter 28, "Integrated Programs,") InterCon has added a Web module to their TCP/
Connect II integrated program.
For the most part, the Web browsers are extremely similar, so Tm going to start with
MacWeb because it sorts first in an alphabetical listing of the names and because we've
licensed it for inclusion on the ISKM disk.
462 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The beauty of writing about Web browsers is that there are almost no instructions to give.
The basic idea is that you connect to the Internet, run the Web browser, and then click on
the underlined words (they can also be in a color, but that doesn't show up well in a black
and white book) to traverse the links between Web pages.
That's about all there is to using the Web. We're not talking difficult here.
MacWeb
MacWeb was the second major Web browser to appear on the Macintosh, and has always
differentiated itself by being small and quick. New features, such as a pop-up menu that
appears if you click and hold on a link, often appear in MacWeb first and are then copied
by the other Web browsers. Because of its small size and low memory requirements,
MacWeb is the browser of choice for people with older Macs or not much memory. Just
for comparison, the latest versions of MacWeb, Netscape, and NCSA Mosaic weigh in at
470K, 1,370K, and 2,200K on disk, respectively, and MacWeb can get by in as little as 750K
of RAM, compared to 1,784K for Netscape (which prefers more) and 2,700K for Mosaic.
Because of these reasonable requirements and because it's a good program, we've in-
cluded MacWeb on the ISKM disk.
Installation and Setup
MacWeb has only a few preferences, which you access by going to the File menu and
choosing Preferences (see figure 25.1). You can change the home page, the page that
MacWeb automatically accesses on launch, to any valid URL (or even an HTML docu-
ment on your disk, which will keep MacWeb from trying to dial out if you connect via
PPP or SLIP); you can have MacWeb automatically open a specific hotlist of stored URLs
at startup; and you can set little things such as Autoload Images (turn this option off for
faster performance) and the window background color. The most important preferences
to set are your email address and your news server in the General section of the Prefer-
ences.
If you don't like tlie way MacWeb assigns fonts to the HTML styles, you can change those
fonts. Choose Styles from the Edit menu to display the Styles dialog (see figure 25.2).
The Element pop-up menu and its submenus enable you to pick which style you're
editing, and because the styles are hierarchical, it's easy to set all the heading styles to,
say, Helvetica, and then vary the font size for the different heading sizes. You also can
modify colors as well, but I'd recommend restraint here. Colored text (and too many
colors in text, especially) can be difficult to read.
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 463
Although you shouldn't have to mess with them, you also can modify MacWeb's default
settings for helper applications and suffix mappings (which are how MacWeb determines
what sort of file it's retrieving).
World
Wide
<
Web
I General
Home URL: http://ummi.tidbits.com/tldbits/
Emoli Rddress: oce@>tidbits.com
Neujs Host: jnems. hoicyon.com
[ Dofouits ] [ Concei ]
Figure 25.1 MacWeb Preferences dialog.
Element: I Root
a
Font;
llelUBtlco Block
Heluetico Compres...
Lubolin Groph
Lucido Bright
Monoco
Rafariinre 1
Style:
□ /totic
□ Bold
□ Underline
□ QXdBDOddq
□ SIHqcQqxid
Size: Colors: ^ H||
□ Size Is Relotiue (S Use Colors
[ Defouits ] [ Concei ] |
Figure 25.2 MacWeb Styles dialog.
Basic Usage
1 always feel funny telling people how to use a Web browser, because it seems so obvious,
and MacWeb is no exception to this. Anyway, when you first launch MacWeb, it accesses
its default home page (see figure 25.3), which may look a little different.
Note
464 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
There's nothing special about the default home page— it just happens to be the page that
MacWeb loads when you launch it, and you can set anything as your home page, I set my
home page to the Dilbert comic strip at:
http: //WWW. unitedmedia^com/comics/dilbert/ today8_dilbert.gif
Internet Starter Kit Internet Resources
IM! ^ ‘ lllkyhia ^ I ts/ { «k> I
Internet
Starter Jjm
a
for Mi
Internet starter Kit\xABXXve\ Resources
This page is intended as a concise coilecdon of starting points to exploring the
Internet and World Wide Web resoirces. With the Internet's rate of change
forever accelerating, this page cannot altennpt to be comprehensive or even
well-rounded. With luck, however, it should allow you to find the resources and
Information that are Important to ) k > u .
Figure 25.3 MacWeb home page.
The basic parts of the MacWeb window are self-explanatory. MacWeb offers forward and
back arrow buttons for moving back and forth between the pages you've visited, a home
button (with a little house on it) for bouncing back to your home page, a question mark
button for Web search items, and an editable but somewhat small URL field for copying
and pasting URLs. At the bottom of the screen, a status field indicates what MacWeb is
doing, along with a preview of what URL goes with any given link. My favorite part of
the status line is that it often tells you the size of the file MacWeb is accessing, and counts
up as it retrieves the file. That kind of feedback is useful when you're on a slow connec-
tion and waiting for a graphic to transfer.
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 465
When you click a link (blue and underlined, although a link becomes red once you've
followed it), MacWeb promptly takes you to the appropriate page, and as it fills the page, 2
you can scroll down. However, if MacWeb must also bring in a graphic, it forces you back 2
to the top of the page while it draws the graphic, which can make for some confusing ^
jumps in the text if you've started reading. Reading text in the MacWeb window works
exactly as you'd expect it to, and the Find feature available in the Edit menu is a big help
if you hit a large page and want to scroll directly to a certain part.
If you find a Web resource that you like and want to visit again, you can add it to your
Hotlist with the Add This Document item under the Hotlist menu. The Hotlist menu also
has a hierarchical Hotlist Interface menu that provides options for creating new hotlists,
opening old ones, editing them, saving them, and so on. If you edit the hotlist, MacWeb
brings up a list of your hotlist entries. Clicking the Edit button enables you to modify the
name and URL (see figure 25.4).
flenu String:
URL:
|rppI« Computer
http://uMDw.apple.con/
_JmL
f Neuj... ]
Menu String: |Rpple Computer Informotlon
URL: |tittp://LLHuui.lnfo.apple.corn7
[ Cancel ] [[ OK ^
jr^
i "X 1
f Cancel ]
Figure 25 A MacWeb Hotlist Editor.
Of course, if you have a URL that you retrieved from email or a TidBITS article, you can
enter it manually into MacWeb. Choose Open URL from the File menu and type or paste
the URL in before pressing Return to activate the link. When you choose Open URL,
MacWeb also provides a pop-up menu of your hotlist items; selecting an item from that
list pastes its URL into the URL field for you to edit if you so choose. Another way to go
to a specific Web site is to paste the URL into the URL field over the existing one, and
press Return to activate it. MacWeb also can open local documents and can reload the
page if for some reason it isn't up-to-date.
World
Wide
Web
Note
466 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Special Features
Although relatively simple, MacWeb has a number of special features that complement its
sparse interface. Although it has a hierarchical History menu under its Navigate menu,
MacWeb also provides a shortcut for navigating to sites you've previously visited. Simply
click and hold on either the Forward or Back buttons. After a second or two, a pop-up
menu appears, listing the history.
MacWeb allows you to resize its window to any size you like, and it remembers the size
of the frontmost window when you quit, opening the window to that size the next time
you launch MacWeb.
If you do decide to run with images turned off by default, you can load selected ones by
clicking them. If, however, you want to see all the images on a page, the Options menu
contains Load Images, which does just that.
MacWeb supports Apple events so it can work quite well with the other Apple event-
capable applications like NewsWatcher and MacWAIS. New to MacWeb in the latest
version though, is support for bookmark files like those used by Anarchie and Fetch.
If you Command-click an FTP link, MacWeb asks Anarchie to retrieve the file instead of
doing so itself. Similarly, although MacWeb doesn't support mailto links internally, it
asks NewsWatcher to deal with them (since NewsWatcher supports the GetURL event,
whereas Eudora doesn't yet). MacWeb does support news URLs internally, but it also can
pass them off to NewsWatcher with a Command-click. I approve of using the more
powerful specific tools in this way, rather than fitting the square Web browsers into too
many round holes.
You also can use other modifiers when clicking on links. The Option key makes MacWeb
open a new window, the Shift key makes MacWeb retrieve links to disk, and the Command
key forces MacWeb to use external helper applications, even if MacWeb can display the
format, such as GIF, internally.
If you click on any link and hold the mouse button down, MacWeb pops up a LinkOps
menu that offers choices for retrieving the link, retrieving it to disk (a very handy way of
snagging graphics from Web pages), viewing information about the link, copying the
URL, saving it to a hotlist, or saving it to disk. This feature works so well that Netscape
copied it.
Unique to MacWeb is the capability to sort your hotlist by name or URL, and you can
export hotlists in MacWeb format, in Mosaic format, or in straight HTML. MacWeb also
can import Mosaic hotlists.
Note
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 467
MacWeb is Power Mac-native. It is extremely fast at redrawing already loaded pages,
something that can be a bit sluggish in other Web browsers. MacWeb also starts and quits
quickly, something you don't think about until you use a program that's slow to launch
and quit, like Netscape.
•-d
a
World
Wide
Web
So that it loorks for everyone, I've put the 68000 version of MacWeb on the ISKM disk. If
you have a Poiver Mac, be sure to download the native version when you get a chance.
There's an Anarchie bookmark for it in your MacWeb folder.
Evaluation & Details
MacWeb is an excellent program in its early releases, and I fully anticipate that most of
the rough edges will be worked out in the future. I would like to see the Hotlist feature
improved and differentiated. The major problem with the current version of MacWeb is
that you cannot select text in the main w^indow, which means that you cannot copy it for
use elsewhere.
Is MacWeb the best Web browser right now? No, that honor goes to Netscape for the
moment. Netscape has tw^o advantages over MacWeb. First, Netscape opens multiple
connections to a server when you connect, which means that it can bring in a number of
images simultaneously, making it faster than MacWeb. Second, Netscape has hierarchical
bookmarks, w4iich makes saving and organizing bookmarks easier in Netscape than in
MacWeb. If MacWeb could gain parity on those tw^o counts, its other features would
easily place it among the best of the Web browsing crowd.
MacWeb w^as wTitten by John Hardin, of the EINet group of MCC (Microelectronics and
Computer Technology Corporation — and no, I don't know^ how they get the acronym to
work). MCC has released MacWeb as freeware for academic, research, or personal use;
companies should contact MCC for licensing information. To report problems with or
make suggestions about MacWeb, send email to macweb0einet.net. You can retrieve the
current version of MacWeb on the Internet at either of the following:
ftp://ftp.einet.net/einet/mac/macv/eb/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Netscape Navigator
The greatest concentration of ex-NCSA Mosaic developers can be found at the Mountain
View offices of startup Netscape Communications. Founded by Jim Clark, previously
Note
468 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
head of Silicon Graphics, and Marc Andreessen, who created the first NCSA Mosaic,
Netscape has gone from complete obscurity to being one of the heavy hitters in the world
of the Web. The reason? Netscape Navigator, which is what happens when you take
talented developers and ask them to write a program they've done once all over again
from scratch, avoiding the mistakes they made the first time and rethinking the parts that
didn't work well. Netscape Navigator basically owns the Web browser market, if you can
call it that since most Web browsers are essentially free, with some estimates giving it as
much as 75 percent market share.
Netscape Navigator (generally just called Netscape, thanks to some weaseling around
with the name early on, when the company was called Mosaic Communications and the
program was called Mosaic Netscape) shines in two specific areas. It's fast, thanks to an
innovative way of establishing multiple connections to the server when you retrieve a
Web page, and it has, by far, the best hotlist feature (called bookmarks in Netscape's
parlance).
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the language in which documents are written
for display on the Web,
Actually, there's a third major reason why Netscape took the Web by storm. Netscape
Communications "extended" the standard HTML 2.0 tags in advance of the forthcoming
HTML 3.0 specification, and supported those extensions in Netscape. The result is that
people writing in HTML can do things graphically, such as wrap text next to a graphic,
that were previously impossible (and still are in other Web browsers). Suddenly, if you
wanted to see a page in all its glory, you had to use Netscape. Many people felt that
Netscape's jumping of the gun wasn't particularly fair play, and many Web page devel-
opers refuse to use Netscape-specific HTML codes until the HTML 3.0 specification is
complete (which should be relatively soon — sometime in mid-1995 is my guess). At that
point MaeWeb and Mosaic will almost certainly add support for all the additional HTML
codes that enable Web page developers to create tables, wrap text around graphics, place
graphics in specific spots on the page, and so on.
Installation & Setup
Netscape has the most preferences of any of the Web browsers, but luckily, you need not
mess with anything past the Mail and News preferences. From the Options menu, choose
Preferences, and then from the pop-up menu in the Preferences dialog, choose Mail and
News to see the various settings (see figure 25.5).
Note
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 469
Preferences ;
Z]
Mail and Neius
p.H«n ^
(SMTP) S*rver : |k1ng,ttdbltt.conr> |
Your N*rt>* ; |Ad*m C. Engtt |
Your Em*n: j>c»<»ltdbtts com |
OrgMiirttion: |TtdBrTS ~]
Signature Ft)* : (•) Non*
PfTseus Communications -..ppsrVWiteUoip* 1 lb) [ Brovs»„ )
_ii»vs
News (NNTP) S*rv*r ; |n*ws.ha1egon com |
Maximum number of articles to shov . |lOO ^~|
[ Cancel ] [[ OK j)
m
Figure 25,5 Netscape Mail and News Preferences.
The settings should be familiar to anyone who's configured other Internet programs,
things like your SMTP server, your news server, your email address, and so on. More
interesting are the preferences for Window and Link Styles, which enables you to not only
choose what you want your window to include in terms of navigational buttons, but also
lets you pick your link styles. Netscape tracks the links you've followed in the past and
displays them in a different color so you can tell where you've been before — a nice touch.
Although you have minimal control over the fonts Netscape uses, it's nowhere near as
customizable as MacWeb or Mosaic. In one respect, I can see why — with all the new codes
coming in HTML 3.0, creating an interface for the user to modify the look of all those tags
will be a nightmare. Interestingly, Netscape is the best Web browser of all for supporting
Japanese, although I can't say anything more intelligent about that support since I don't
know Kanji.
Control over HTML display drives Web publishers from the desktop publishing world nuts,
because they want to make sure you see their pages as they intended them to be seen, but
that's not a trivial task on the Web. It's a two-edged sword, actually, because many people
have bad vision, are color-blind, or otherwise don't like the way some Web publications look,
and the control over the fonts and all enables them to make something readable that might
not have been readable otherwise.
World
Wide
Web
470 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You might also check out the other items in Netscape's Options menu, because they
enable you to hide or show the toolbar, the location field, the directory buttons, FTP
information, and images, (should you not want to auto-load images). I prefer a mix of the
various buttons and controls Netscape can place at the top of the window, so I usually
turn off the directory buttons, but leave the toolbar and location field on. I also leave the
toolbar style at text and images because that makes the all-important Back button larger
and easier to click.
When you're done messing with the settings, choose Save Options from the Options
menu to make sure that Netscape remembers your settings for the next session.
Basic Usage
When push comes to shove, using Netscape is almost exactly like using any other Web
browser. They're kind of dull that way. Basically, when you launch Netscape, you see its
main window displaying whatever the default home page is (see figure 25.6).
Netscape: UJelcome to Netscape
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Vh4VsN»v?| Cool? | Hto^ook | N»t8»ych I NttDfetoiotllj N»vsgr^p^ |
New at Netscape
Figure 25.6 Netscape main window.
Although I generally run with the Directory buttons for What's New?, What's Cool?,
Handbook, Net Search, Net Directory, and Newsgroups turned off, I think they're handy
for new Internet users who may launch Netscape and then ask, "How do I search the
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 471
Internet?" Well, if you're running Netscape, the simple answer is, "Click the Net Search
button." In fact, each of these buttons takes you to another, constantly updated, Web page ^
that Netscape Communications maintains. The Net Search and Net Directory buttons in ^
particular point you to the best search engines and the best directories (of course, the
Internet Starter Kit home page that you get with MacWeb also points to those same search
engines and directories — they're not secret).
Netscape does the best job of displaying newsgroups if you, for some reason, decide you
want to read news in something other than one of the newsreaders. Netscape uses an
outline-like structure to display threads. When you go into an article, Netscape provides a
customized header and links as much as possible, such as the name of the newsgroup, the
email address of the poster, and so on. Netscape also has some custom graphics at the top
and bottom of each article or article list that provide graphical access to the basic func-
tions necessary while reading news (see figure 25.7).
Figure 25 J Netscape news reading.
One neat feature of reading news in Netscape is that URLs become hot, so you can click
them to follow the link without any fuss. If you click a mailto URL or want to reply to a
news message, Netscape brings up a pre-addressed window for you to enter your mes-
sage (see figure 25.8). You also can use the Mail Document command in the File menu at
any time to bring up this window, with the URL of the current page already in the body,
so you can send it to friends to let them know about the page you are looking at. The
Quote Document button inserts the entire document in the body of the message, and the
Attach button enables you to attach the document, the HTML code for the document, or
another file to your mail.
World
Wide
Web
472
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Send Moil/Post Neujs 1
From: "Rdam C. Engst" <aceetldbl ts.com>
hail to : resn 1 ck6u I uc . edu
Post to:
Subject: Network time servers
Rttachment:
TbaiOcs lor the pointer, Pete I
[ Send ]
[ Quote Document 1
I Attach... 1
IS
cheers . . . -Marr|
resniok0uiuc.edu (Pete Kesnick) wrote:
>>>k list of time servers is available via anonymous FTP from the
University
>>>of Delaware. It is located at:
>>
> >> ftp : //louie . udel . edu/puh/ntp/doo /clock . txt
.n.
Figure 25.8 Netscape Send Mail/Post Nezos window.
I'd never bother to read news in Netscape because it's nowhere near as good as
NewsWatcher, NewsHopper, or any of the other newsreaders, but I do appreciate the
ease of mailing a URL or document to someone. For a while, Netscape put the URL of the
current page in the Subject line, so I can still tell who's using the older version by how
much mail I get with a URL in the Subject line.
Last, but by no means list, is Netscape's Bookmark List (which is equivalent to the hotlist
features in other browsers). Many people just use the Add Bookmark command in the
Bookmarks menu to add bookmarks, but that's a mistake. The reason is that Netscape
supports hierarchical bookmarks, but it isn't terribly easy to figure out how to use the
Bookmark List window (see figure 25.9).
There are a few important facts to keep in mind about the Bookmark List. First of all, you
can create headers, which turn into hierarchical submenus in the Bookmarks menu, and
dividers, which look like standard dividers in the Bookmarks menu. When you double-
click a header, it either expands to show the bookmarks subordinate to it, or, if it's already
open, it closes to hide them (and switches to an underlined style). Second, you can move
bookmarks around in the list by selecting one and clicking on the up and down arrows
below the list. The arrows are slow and clumsy (this task cries for drag and drop), and I
recommend you only use them for moving bookmarks a short distance. Third, the most
important thing I figured out about the Bookmark List is that if you have the Bookmark
List window open, and a specific bookmark selected, choosing Add Document from the
Bookmarks menu (or pressing K-D) adds the current page's URL as a bookmark right
after the selected bookmark.
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 473
mn
Bookmark List
[ Add Bookmark ] [ Go To ]
http : / / w v.y ahoo com /
1 >^(>
[nnd:]|
[nore Options ]
[ View Bookmarks'] [ Export... ] [ Import... ]
Menu Adds After: I End of List
Menu Starts Vfth: I Entire List
[ftev bookmark ] [ Nev Hoador ] [ Nev Divider ]
N4me: |
1 Yahoo - A Guide to VW |
Location : |
1 http://vwv.yahoo.oom/ |
Last Visited :
Sat, Apr 22, 1995
Added On :
Fri,0ct 10, 1924
Description :
The BEST Veb catalog.
[pever Options ] [ Copy Item ] [Remove Item]
Figure 25.9 Netscape Bookmark List,
In other words, if you're smart, you won't just casually add bookmarks. Instead, you'll
open your Bookmark List each time, select the bookmark above where you want the new
one to go, and then choose Add Bookmark. It's more trouble, sure, but once you try to
rearrange your bookmarks with those up and down arrow buttons, you'll see why I
suggest this method. It's easier in the long run, and it keeps your bookmarks nicely
organized.
When you want to use a bookmark, you can select it from the Bookmarks menu, but if
you happen to have the Bookmark List window open, you can also use the Go To button
or just double-click a bookmark. When I was rearranging my bookmarks, I found the
easiest method was to go to a bookmark, use the Remove Item button to delete it from its
old location, select another bookmark in the new location, and press K-D to add the
bookmark back in. Clumsy, but effective.
Special Features
I'd probably place Netscape's speed at the top of any list of special features since the Web
is only as interesting as the speed at which you see it come in. I find Web browsers like
Enhanced Mosaic (see the following capsule review) that don't display a page until all the
graphics have come in are unusable even over my dedicated Internet connection.
World
Wide
Web
Note
474 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Second in Netscape's special features is its Bookmarks List, which although it has some
problems, such as the lousy up and down arrows, it also has lots of other great features,
such as letting you know when you added a link and when you last visited the link. You
can manually change the name of the link or the link's URL, and if you want to send your
list of bookmarks to someone else or post it on the Web, you can Export it to HTML. The
View Bookmarks button gives you a preview of what your bookmarks will look like to
someone else, and if you collect a truly huge number of bookmarks, there's a Find button
to help you find a specific one. Finally, if you find all these possibilities boggling, just click
the Fewer Options button, and Netscape shrinks the window to show only the list of
bookmarks.
Netscape introduced the first support for what are called interlaced GIFs, or images that
have been saved in a special format. When Netscape (or now MacWeb) loads in the
images, they start rough and gradually become more focused. This enables you to quickly
see if you want to move on or wait for the entire image. Netscape was also the first
browser to support JPEG images inline, just like GIFs, although TCP /Connect ITs Web
browser also now supports inline JPEGs.
I prefer MacWeb's sh/le of bringing in interlaced GIFs because it draws every other line or
so, but at full resolution, it scans as though you're looking through Venetian blinds, whereas
Netscape draws a rough, blocky image and gradually improves the definition.
As part of its capability to open multiple connections to the same server, Netscape also
supports multiple connections to multiple servers in different windows. I like this feature
because when the servers are slow, it enables me to keep several windows going at once
so that Tm never sitting and waiting for data to arrive.
In the most recent version of Netscape (I.IN), Netscape knows how to zoom the window
appropriately. This is a bit difficult because the text will wrap to any window size, but
Netscape has somehow figured out the best way to zoom the window for the graphics
and the headings, which makes it easier to move between Web pages that assume differ-
ent width windows.
Of all the browsers, Netscape is the most responsive in terms of allowing you to move on
to another page before the current page has completely arrived. This may seem like a
minor detail, but when you start browsing around the Web, there's nothing worse than
waiting for a big graphic to come in that you didn't want to see in the first place.
Although Netscape isn't great at FTP, it has gotten better now that it allows System 7.5
users to drag an FTP link (really, just grab it and drag it) to the Finder. At that point,
Netscape opens a small window for downloading that file and lets you continue working.
Finally, Netscape offers a configurable cache that stores text and images from sites that
you've visited. Although this feature can speed up repeated visits to the same site, it also
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 475
seems to make Netscape launch and quit relatively slowly, especially if you set a large
cache. I tried as much as 20 MB at one point, but that made Netscape quit so slowly that it J
was painful. I now use a 2 MB cache. 2
<
Evaluation & Details
For the moment, Netscape Navigator is the best Web browser available, bar none. It's fast;
it's easy to use; and it has some welcome features that all users will appreciate. However,
1 should caution you about the speed at which things change on the Web. It's entirely
possible that another hungry startup with some wizard programmers will come out with
a Web browser that puts Netscape to shame, at which point I could easily see 75 percent
of the Web switching over to that browser in a matter of months. For the moment, though,
Netscape has the spotlight, and if recent releases of Netscape Navigator are any indica-
tion, the company has no intention of letting anyone else steal its thunder.
In part because of its popularity, Netscape has rather odd and somewhat irritating
distribution requirements. Netscape Communications, although they would never
respond to requests for explanation or clarification, has said that only sites in the edu
domain may post Netscape for access via FTP, which eliminates all the major mirror
networks because there are some sites in the com domain included among the mirror sites.
So, finding Netscape at any site other than ftp . netscape . com can prove difficult, and
that site is often too overloaded to serve all the folks who would like to get a copy of
Netscape.
However, once you can get a copy, Netscape's wording says, "You can download a copy
of Netscape Navigator for evaluation or for unlimited use in academic or not-for-profit
environments. If you want to purchase Netscape Navigator and associated support for
ongoing use, you can order it directly from Netscape Communications Corporation. Send
email to sales@netscape.com and you'll get an automated reply with purchasing
information." I'll leave it to you to interpret that wording for yourself — nowhere does
Netscape give a time limit on the evaluation period. If you do decide to purchase
Netscape for the support, it costs $39, and a printed manual is another $20. International
prices vary somewhat.
http://vww.netscape.com/
ftp : / /f tp . netscape . com/ netscape /mac/
Other Web-related Programs
Although 1 currently feel that MacWeb and Netscape (and TCP/Connect II, in chapter 28,
"Integrated Programs") are the only Web browsers to really consider, there are others,
including NCSA Mosaic, Enhanced Mosaic, and MacWWW, the latter of which I mention
for historic reasons. In addition, there are a few Web servers worth mentioning.
World
Wide
Web
476 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
WebSTAR (previously MacHTTP), NetWings, and httpd4Mac. Unless I note other^vise, all
of the programs listed below are available in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Clay Basket
Even Netscape’s hierarchical bookmark list, useful as
it may be, is pretty lousy. Enter Dave Winer of
UserLand Software, the guy who basically created the
computer outlining program with ThInkTank and MORE
many years ago. Dave has become a major Web fan,
and Is working on a program code-named Clay Basket
that acts as an Independent hotlist, currently only for
Netscape, but which could theoretically serve as an
independent hotlist for other applications as well. It’s
too early to say much about how well it works, but if it
beats the Netscape hierarchical bookmarks, I’ll use It
constantly. Check the Web site below for updates — I
hope It will be available by the time you read this.
Dookmoiks.lilml
1 Doci 1 1 TooU 1 1 N»WI 1 1 Mill 1 1 |
V Vehoo - A Quida to WWW
^ Check PeriodiCQlly
> Catologs
P riBctntosh Resources
> Locel Informstion
> Internet Info
> lists of Information',
► Providers of Commercial Internet
P Internet Service Providers List
> InfoSeek Home Page
31IZIZII
Enplres B/1/95 rZI —
4
Clay Basket 1.0b1
TbtOnlinaOaiUntT
C 1993. UMflmd Seflvtn*
10b2 a/11/9S
0
1031 1C
http: //vw/w. hotwired.com/Staff/userland/clay/
Enhanced Mosaic
Although NCSA gives away NCSA Mosaic for free,
they also have licensed the code to a number of
companies, who have then created versions of
Enhanced Mosaic. The versions of Enhanced Mosaic
I’ve seen are feature-poor In comparison with
Netscape, MacWeb, and NCSA Mosaic 2.0, although
they seem faster and more stable than the early
version of NCSA Mosaic on which they are based.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the version
of Enhanced Mosaic (from O’Reilly & Associates)
that I tested is that it doesn't display pages until it has
brought in all the graphics. And it provides no
indication of how long it will take to finish retrieving
the graphics. In other words, you have no idea how
long you'll sit and wait before you get to see the next
page. Versions of Enhanced Mosaic are commercial
products only.
EnhaiKod
fr<m aR8iUy& Associates, Inc.
Cuftomixcd for uie witli llte Ctobal KeMmrk Kavia«tor
Copyright 1994 SpggUxt, he.
Copyright 1 995-94 Bo*rd of Trwrtot f of Ih* Unfvrrf«y of mhols.
NCSA MomIo wax dovtloptd by thr National Cantar for Suparconriputhg
Applloatlonx at lha Unlvarxlty of mhois at Urbana-Champaign.
Enhanoad vrrxions davabpad by Spyglaix, he.
Uersion: 1.01 (68000)
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 477
httpd4Mac
Bill Melotti’s free httpd4Mac is a very simple Web
server implemented as a faceless background
application. Bill designed httpd4Mac to be fast and
free, since the other Web sen/ers available for the
Mac are either shareware or commercial. However,
httpd4Mac doesn’t currently support any sort of
interactive Web pages such as forms or clickable
image maps, which limits its appeal for heavy-duty
use. In addition, the complete lack of an interface
may bother some people because tracking what
httpd4Mac thinks Is happening becomes difficult, and
the only way to modify its configuration is by editing a
preferences text file. Still, It might be worth a look if
you want a free Web server to try out.
Imagine a faceless background application here!
<
World
Wide
Web
MacWWW
MacWWW, also called Samba (depending on what
you read online) doesn’t work particularly well, but is
notable because it was the first Macintosh Web
browser. MacWWW was written by Robert Cailliau and
others at CERN. MacWWW is commercial software
from CERN, and costs 50 ECU (European Currency
Units). The source code is also available, for quite a
lot more. Check the information at CERN for the
details.
ms The Ulorld-tlUde Uleb UIrtuol Library; Subject Catalogue
VyW virtual Llbrarg
Thia Is the subject catalogue. Sm also arrangament bg service type . hail
wv-request#lnfo cern.ch to add pointers to this list
Aeronautics
Mailing list erchive Index Sea also NASA LeRC
Agricalture
Separate list, see also Almanac mail servers
Astronomf and Astraphgsics
Abstract Indexes at NASA, Astrophysics work at FNAL, Princeton's Sloane
Digitel Sky Survey, the STCLAR project, Space Telescope Electronic
Information System See also space
Bio Sciences
Separate list .
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Clients.html
NCSA Mosaic for the Mac
Although the free (for personal use) NCSA Mosaic
originally popularized the Web, it has drastically
declined in popularity. The reason is that develop-
ment on the program has moved sluggishly, thanks In
part to many of the NCSA Mosaic developers left for
jobs at various companies, most notably Netscape
Communications. Mosaic does have a few unique
features. It enables you to make personal annotations
to any document on the Web, either In text or using
the audio-input features of your Mac. Mosaic also
includes a Kiosk mode that actually removes some
functionality from the program to make it better for
continues
478 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
public use. When it was the only game in town,
NCSA Mosaic was absolutely essential. However, I
now recommend either Netscape or MacWeb over
Mosaic. Mosaic doesn’t quite compare in terms of
features, and it’s slower and clumsier. More
seriously, although none of the browsers are among
the more stable Internet programs I’ve used, Mosaic
has been the flakiest of the three.
ftp : / /f tp . ncsa . uiuc . edu/Mac /Mosaic/
NetWings
One of the most serious problems facing the Web
today is that it can be hard to maintain a coherent
set of Web pages. A Web server called NetWings
offers a solution for at least some folks with this
problem— It uses a database back-end to store the
data and serves it out when requested. NetWings is
based on 4D, the powerful relational database from
ACI US, and because it’s a server, it can do things
like format HTML on the fly from the information
stored In the database. NetWings is just entering
public beta testing as I write this, so there's no
telling how popular it will become, but I think It's an
extremely Interesting approach, and one for which I
have high hopes.
http://netwings.com/
WebSTAR
StarNIne’s WebSTAR (which, when It comes out, will
be released in both shareware and commercial
versions), previously called MacHTTP, is a World
Wide Web server written by Chuck Shotton. WebSTAR
enables a Mac with a dedicated Internet connection
to serve World Wide Web documents to Web
browsers. Basically, you create HTML documents and
store them, along with Images if you want, in the
WebSTAR folder. Then, whenever anyone browses
into your Mac from the Web, WebSTAR serves up
those documents. WebSTAR supports Apple events
and can link AppleScript scripts to URLs, making it
Note
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 479
possible for you to use Apple event-capable
applications like FileMaker Pro for serving data to the
Web. WebSTAR is Power Mac-native and threaded,
and testing shows that on a Power Mac, WebSTAR’s
performance is equal to that of much more expensive
Unix workstations.
I
5
World
Wide
Web
http: / /wv/v/. starnine.com/
Helper Applications
For the most part, the various Web browsers have opted not to include the proverbial
kitchen sink in their code, and they all rely on a common set of helper applications for
dealing with certain types of data. There are numerous other applications that you can
use as helper applications, but these are the most popular. All are available at the URL
below, unless mentioned otherwise.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Ifn Web browser cannot launch your helper applications properly, try rebuilding your
desktop— if the desktop database is out-of-date, the Web broioser may not be able to find the
proper helper application.
Adobe Acrobat
One criticism of the HTML format used on the World
Wide Web is that it doesn’t provide the kind of
complete control that desktop publishers are used to
when laying out a page. There are a number of
electronic document formats that some people use
for this purpose, including Adobe Acrobat, Common
Ground from No Hands Software, WordPerfect’s
Envoy, and Farallon's Replica. Of these, Acrobat is
the most common, and Adobe and Netscape are
reportedly working to include support for Acrobat’s
PDF documents in future versions of Netscape. Until
then, you’ll have to use these programs as helper
applications. I wasn’t able to find a Web page for
Common Ground, although the others do have Web
pages.
For pra^Dol InfarmatUa and aallna balp, pWaia aaa lha ffla
'Halp-Raadar.pdr* la (ba Acrabal** Raadar Halp faldar.
©1987-1994 l*K 9 rpor«ltd All <-ighu raaarvad. Adot», AoroMi tri Acrobat I 090
ara tradamancs of Adcba Sgitam traorpcratad vMob rray ta ra^tarao t» earlalr Jurbitotloiv
480 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
http : / /w\wv . adobe . com/Acrobat /AcrobatO . html
ftp : / /f tp . adobe . com/ pub/ adobe /Acrobat /Macintosh/
http : / /wp . novell . com/ envoy /envoytoc . htm
http : / /wvw/2 . f arallon . com/ww\v/v/v/w2/ rep/ repmac . html
JPEGView
Although the trend among Web browsers is to
display JPEG graphics along with the text and GIF
graphics on a Web page, not all of them can do this
yet. Those that don’t, send all JPEG images, and
most other unsupported graphics formats, to
JPEGView from Aaron Giles, which is postcardware.
JPEGView does an admirable job of displaying JPEG
Images, and is Power Mac-native for a significant
speed boost for Power Mac users. JPEGView can
crop images, resize them, and convert between a
number of different formats. It’s a staple for other
Internet programs that use helper applications as
well, such as TurboGopher.
JPEGView
^ uritten by Aitroii Giles
iiuuu\ uri;oi/ii7u#
a fast, powerful, easy-to-use image viewer
for €BOxO and PowerPC Macintoshes.
JPEGView is postcardware. This means that if you use it. you owe me a
postcard, preferabiy a colorful one— and email doesn't count/
JPEGView has an extensive on-line help system, which is available from
I ; J the bottom of the menu. You can also turn on balloon help for
additional asststance in aO menus and windows.
JPEGView’s on-line help is a.‘so available kt a printed, bound edition. To
^ order a copy, send USS20 (USS23 if you are overseas) to me. and I will
send you the manual. Please aHow 4-6 weeks tor delivery.
Please address aB postcards, orders, and inquiries to:
If you have JPEGVlew-retated questions, concerns,
or suggestions, you can also email me (but once
again, use real snail mail for postcardsi):
Aaron Giles
P.O. Box 2967
San Rafael. CA 94912
U.SJI.
Internet: gllea^med.comell.adu America On-Line: AGIloa
JP(GVm» ccda and documentation cofyynght C 1992-94. Aaron Cdas — At Biffhig aeserved
MacBinary 11+
Making files available for download via a Web
browser is somewhat haphazard, thanks to the way
the Macintosh files can have both resources and data
forks. The safest method is the standard, BinHex, but
a much tighter format is MacBinary, which stores
both forks of a normal Mac file together in a single
file that you can upload to other types of computers.
If you want to download a file in MacBinary format
(usually indicated by a .bin extension), you need a
helper application that can decode the MacBinary
format, because Web browsers, unlike FTP clients,
don’t do so automatically. All that said, the program
you need is Peter Lewis’s free MacBinary ll-f- because
it can work with the Web browsers to decode
MacBinary files. MacBinary ll-f has no interface; if a
Web browser doesn't call it automatically, you must
drop a MacBinary file on MacBinary 11+ to have that
file decoded.
MacBinary 11+
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 481
MoviePlayer
Although Sparkle, and even SimpleText, can handle
QuickTime movies. Web browsers generally default to
using Apple’s MoviePlayer to display QuickTime
movies. Of course, you must also have QuickTime
installed for any of these to work. You can’t download
MoviePlayer, although it comes with QuickTime and
on the System 7.5 CD. Getting QuickTime has
become more difficult if you don't get it with your Mac
or with System 7.5, although you can purchase it
online at the Web page below. Frankly, if getting
MoviePlayer becomes a problem, I recommend using
Sparkle, SimpleText, or one of the other free
QuickTime players, like Leonard Rosenthol’s
Popcorn, which are readily available.
MoviePlayer^^
is on opplicotlon program
you uso to ploy ond edit
QuickTime mouies.
Saftvar* B|;
Chris Thormen
Based on the Original Bg:
Rich WilUami
Version 1 0
Avalleble memery: B29K
Lictnaed to: CUIne Dennli
Apple Computer
C Apple Computer, Inc. 1991* 1992
1 ) I. ■■'t II
a
World
Wide
Web
http://quicktime.apple.com/
SimpleText
Web browsers occasionally need to download or
display straight text, or sometimes the HTML source
code for a Web page. Although any word processor or
text editor should work for this purpose, and I always
use NIsus Writer. Apple’s SimpleText is usually the
default because it’s free with every Macintosh. If your
Mac or version of the System Is old, you may have
the older and less-capable TeachText Instead.
SimpleText is available at some of Apple’s FTP sites,
but everyone should have at least one, if not four or
five, copies on their hard disks from Installing
commercial applications that typically come with
TeachText or SimpleText so you will be able to open
ReadMe files with a simple double-click.
SimpleText
Web browsers occasionally need to download or display
straight text, or sometimes tbe HTML source code for a Web
page Although any word processor or text editor should work
for this purpose, and I always reset my preferences to use
Hisus Writer, Apple ‘s SimpleText is usually the default because
it's free and it comes with every Macintosh If your Mac or
version of the System la old. you may have TeachText
Instead-lt's the same Idea only older and unable to open more
than one document at a time SimpleText Is available at some of
Apple's FTP sites, but everyone should have at least one. if not
four or five, copies on their hard disks from installing
commercul applications
13 Rbout SlmpleTBMt... SZT ':
SlmpleTeat
TomOavOv
front origtul VMirs bg
K«t\. Heon, FrarMit, ird Brym
O Apote Conf»:1»r, Irm. 19S5-ISS*
SoundApp
Although SoundMachine seems to be used as the
default for most audio files, the most recent version
of Norman Franke’s free SoundApp claims to play
even more sound formats, including one. the
Windows WAVE format, that SoundMachine doesn’t
handle. I haven’t seen many (OK, any, but I’m not big
on downloading sounds) WAVE files, but because
they come from the Windows world, you're likely to hit
some eventually. SoundApp can handle the Internet
standard Sun au format, so you could use it for all of
your audio needs.
~ ~ Help [
SoundApp 1.5.1
By Norman Franke
m
SoundApp 19 Freeware You mag use it at no cost. Hovevar, SoundApp la
atm CopgiiQht 1 993- 1 995 bg Norman Franke. All righta reaerved.
SoundApp mag not be included inang for-profit aoftvare compilation
or bundled vith ang other for-profit package, except with prior
written consent from the author. Norman Franks. SoundApp mag be
distributed freeig on on-line services and bg users groups, except
where noted above, provided It is distributed unmodified.
You expressig acknowledge and agree that use of SoundApp is at gour
exclusive risk. SoundApp, ang related files end documentation are
provided “AS IS** and without eng war rantg of ang kind, expressed or
Topics: I About
482 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
SoundMachine
Rod Kennedy’s free SoundMachine is the most
popular application for playing the audio files that you
run across on the Internet because of Its support for
the standard Sun au format. Though It Is mostly used
to play sounds, SoundMachine can also record
sounds In the au format. Although It would probably
drive me nuts In normal use, I rather like
SoundMachIne’s Chatterbox Mode, where It uses
Apple’s PlaInTalk technology to read the text of the
menu items and buttons you select.
Sparkle
There are two video formats that are fairly common
on the Web, QuickTime and MPEG. The most popular
MPEG player for the Macintosh Is Maynard Handley’s
free and frequently updated Sparkle. Sparkle also can
display PICT files and QuickTime movies, and It
contains PowerPC code for optimum movie playing
performance on Power Macs. Sparkle requires
System 7.5 or System 7 along with a whole slew of
additional extensions, including QuickTime 1.6,
Sound Manager 3.0, and the Thread Manager,
among others.
Stuffit Expander
Aladdin Systems’ free Stuffit Expander Is such a
necessary part of your Internet toolkit that we’ve
Included it on the ISKM disk. Stuffit Expander Is
universally used as a helper application to debinhex
files and to expand both Stuffit and Compact Pro
archives, along with self-extracting archives created
by either of those two programs. If you own one of
Aladdin's commercial products or register their
shareware DropStuff with Expander Enhancer, Stuffit
Expander gains the capability to decode many other
formats, include MacBlnary, Unix Compress, and zip
files. I encourage everyone to register DropStuff with
Expander Enhancer if you want to decode these
additional formats— It’s a great way to thank Aladdin
for making the basic Stuffit Expander available for
free.
aO(AK> BOSOrTHX
f^Ut U«aks t«:
Ym l,im t1 AUMtn,*jr Mil ttiltrt.
Vn, for iu1n« Ui4« xeOk«i
• in2-I9M kw kw.
Chapter 25 ♦ World Wide Web 483
Zipit
The zip format, that's the standard in the PC world, is
one of the formats that Stuffit Expander can only
handle after you’ve registered DropStuff or purchased
another Aladdin product. While you're getting around
to registering DropStuff, you can try out Tommy
Brown's $15 shareware Zipit, which also can decode
(and encode) zip files. One way or another, please
support these shareware efforts. Tommy Brown
modeled Ziplt’s interface on Compact Pro, although
of course you shouldn’t have to interact with the
interface to a helper application all that much.
a
5
World
Wide
Web
WWWrapping Up
The Web is where the action is, and I hope this chapter has given you the necessary
information to pick out a Web browser and start poking around. Everything changes so
fast that it's hard to say where you should start, but I currently recommend you point
your browser at Yahoo and either browse or searcli for information. If you can't find it in
Yahoo, one of the search engine links in Yahoo should help, if anything can. Enjoy your-
self, and remember to come up for air every now and then. The Web can be a mighty
vortex.
http: //WWW. yahoo. com/
In addition, I've created an ISKM Home Page (the version of MacWeb on the ISKM disk
goes to it by default) that points to many of the rest of the best sites on the Internet for
searching and browsing; by using these links you should be able to find anything that is
actually available. These are the same resources I use, so I've given you the exact same
tools to which I turn whenever I need to find something on the Web.
http: //v/ww. mcp.com/hayden/iskm/
All this browsing is fine and nice, but what if you want to create your own Web pages?
Read on, because the next chapter tells you everything you need to know about the
process on a Macintosh, unlike most other books that I've seen about the Web.
Note
Chapter
Creating Your
Web Page
In tliis chapter I explain how to make your own home page and how to comfortably begin
creating a set of related pages. First, I talk about HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
2.0, the language of the Web, complete with information about how to make links, include
graphics, and test a Web page. I also give suggestions about what you might put on a
page and give a few pointers for when to consider using features coming in the final
HTML 3.0 specification. Toward the end of this chapter, you'll find a collection of capsule
reviews covering a number of Web authoring tools and contact information for a few
valuable Web-authoring resources.
To spare you the agony of correctly typing URLs into your Web browser, I have created a
Web page that includes links to the Web URLs mentioned in this chapter.
http : / /v/ww.mcp. com/hayden/iskm/html - resources . html
Also, to give credit where credit is due, this chapter was written by my wife, Tonya Engst,
who's become a major Web and HTML aficionado in recent months and who was emi-
nently qualified to write it. Without her work on this chapter, it would have been much
harder to finish this edition in a timely fashion.
Note
486 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Web Authoring Preview
When you create a Web page, you are a Web author, and hence — to use the slang appro-
priately — you are authoring a Web page. On a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being easy,
authoring a Web page rates about a 3. All you need is a word processor, attention to
detail, common sense, and a place to serve your page where others can access it with Web
browsers.
You can create a Web page in any word processing program, and if you don't have a
word processor (or you dislike your word processor) you can use a text editor such as
SimpleText or BBEdit. Once you know a little about making Web pages, you may want to
tr}' software designed for Web authoring. You can read about such software later in this
chapter.
Web pages consist of text marked with HTML tags that give a Web browser guidelines for
how to show the text. For example, to emphasize something, you enclose it in a pair of
<em> tags, like this: <em>Pay Attention!</em>. A Web browser wall then show Pay
Attention! in an emphasized way (perhaps in bold or italic) to make it stand out visually.
Attention to detail counts, because HTML tags are picky little things and typographical
errors can wreak havoc on even simple pages.
Common sense also counts when it comes to creating a Web page. HTML is a subset of
another markup language called SGML, which stands for Structured Generalized Markup
Language. The "structured" in SGML's name is important. Most HTML tags set the
structure of a page, not what a page looks like. Think about it. People all over the world
use the Web with all sorts of computers (and in the next few years we may even have
devices like Web-based speech synthesizers). You can't count on Web browsers to display
layout details such as white space or columns; you can't count on them to display typo-
graphical niceties such as fonts; and you certainly can't count on them to display pictures.
As a result, well-done Web pages primarily use structural tags that emphasize text, make
strong statements, set up lists, and create topic headings.
SGML is actually a language for creating other languages, which are then called DTDs, or
Document Type Definitions. HTML is an example of a DTD.
Before you jump in and author a Web page, decide how you will ser\^e it to the Internet.
You must find an organization that will serve your page, thus making it available
to anyone using the Web. You might ask your Internet provider or your system
adminstrator. Many schools and businesses serve employee and student home pages, and
an ever-increasing number of commercial Internet providers serve the home pages of
their customers (usually at a low cost or free to individuals). After you find an organiza-
tion that will serve your page, ask about these issues:
Note Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 487
1. You might want to serve more than one page — if you serve several pages, you may
be able to better organize your information and create hypertext links between
pages. Ask if you can serve a folder's worth of related pages and graphics. Ask if the
folder has a size limit.
2. The Web is picky about file names, and file names must end with an extension that ^ creating
indicates the file type. For example, a Web page coded in HTML needs a . htm or 3. Your web
. html extension. The specific extension depends on the ser\^er that serves your files. <
Also, the length of a file name may be limited by the server.
3. Ask how you can update your pages.
4. Ask if there is any charge for serving your pages, and ask if there are any extra
charges if they prove enormously popular.
You can easily run your own Web server on a Macintosh, but it's not terribly realistic unless
you have a permanent Internet connection, preferably something at least as fast as a 56 Kbps
hookup. Check these Web pages for more information on setting up a Web server:
http : / /abs . apple . com/pub /apple • internet -providers/
http ; / /WWW. uwtc .Washington . edu/Computing/WWW/CreatingASite . html
Introduction to HTML
HTML is tag-oriented. An HTML document begins with the tag <html>, ends with the tag
</html>, and anything between those two tags is either basic text or another tag. Put the
right tags and text together, and you end up with a nift)' Web page.
HTML has tw^o types of tags: single and paired. A single tag sits by itself and tells a Web
browser to do something specific. For example, the <hr> tag tells a Web browser to insert
a horizontal rule. Paired tags come in twos, and they surround the text they apply to. The
ending tag always includes a forward slash right after its beginning bracket. For example,
the <strong> tag pair works like this: <strong>I love you!</strong>. The <strong> tag
pair codes for strength, and a Web browser will interpret the pair by giving the phrase 'T
love you!" a strong appearance (which may in fact vary depending on which Web
browser the readers use and how it is set up).
If I wanted to shozu how the <strong> tag pair zuorks loithout giving a specific example, I
would write: <strong>. . .text. , ,</strong>. Later in this chapter, you'll see tag pairs ex-
plained in this luay, so don't say I didn't zoarn you!
Note Note
488 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You can type tags in either uppercase or lowercase —it makes no difference. You may see both
in examples of HTML on the Web.
A Web page has two main parts: the head and the body. The head contains introductory
and descriptive matter, such as a title, and the body contains everything else, except for
the ending </html> tag. The text and tags for the basic Web page shown in figure 26.1
look like the following:
<html>
<head>
<title>Ingrid's Penguin Page</title>
</head>
<body>
Why eat chocolate when you can eat fish instead?
</body>
</html>
Why eat chocolate when you can eat fish instead?
IIOI-IITI m
Figure 26.1 A Web browser doesn't shozv HTML tags; instead it shows a title and
body text.
As you can see in figure 26.1, the Web browser uses the <html>, <head>, <title>, and
<body> tags behind the scenes. Anyone viewing the page sees only the title and body
text. If you type lots of text between the <body> tag pair, the text would show on the Web
page as one long paragraph.
Many of the screen shots in this chapter show glimpses of a Web page titled "Ingrid's
Penguin Page." Feel free to use your Web broivser to view the source of Ingrid's Penguin
Page and to re-use the HTML code.
http : / /WWW . mcp . com/ hayden/ iskm/ ingrid . html
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 489
Tags for Text
HTML has a number of tags for text, which you use within the body of an HTML docu-
ment to set up the structure and appearance of a page.
Creating
New Paragraphs and Lines 5
Web browsers do handle word wrap, such that text automatically wraps down to the next
line, but they typically do not understand the idea of pressing Return to start a new line
or paragraph. Even if you press Return to start new paragraphs within an HTML docu-
ment, Web browsers ignore those Return characters.
Fortunately, HTML includes tags for starting a new paragraph and for starting a new line.
The new paragraph tag, <p>, typically puts some space above the paragraph, but the new
line tag, <br>, starts a new line without adding extra space (see figure 26.2). Here is a
snippet of HTML code with <p> and <br> tags:
This page was last updated on April 1, 1995.
<p>Ingrid Penguin
<br>One Herring Lane, Snowy Patch U27
<br>Frosty City, South Pole
i±iE>) sni]
This page was last updated on April
Ingrid Penguin
One Herring Lane, Snowy Patch ^27
Frosty City, South Pole
iniiiiQiLi
Figure 26.2 The extra space above "Ingrid Penguin" is due to a <p> tag.
fl le;///Hernes/ISKM/lngrld.hlml
1. 1995
Topic Headings
Web pages use topic headings to help viewers understand the flow of information. The
<hl> pair is for the most important headings, the <h2> pair is for the next most important
headings, and so on, all the way to the <h6> pair, which is for headings at the sixth level
of importance. Figure 26.3 shows the <h2> topic heading coded as follows:
Note
490 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
<h2>0ther Penguins on the Web</h2>
Ingrid's Penguin Page
Hj Hli H
fl l«: ///Hermes/ ISKn/IngrId.htiil
Other Penguins on the Web
• A penguin clock
• A cartoon -like pencuin wiUi lots of Interests.
1
Figure 263 Other Penguins on the Web is an h2-level heading.
Text after a heading doesn't need to start with a <p> or <br> tag; Web browsers assume text
after a heading starts on a new line.
Lists and Glossaries
HTML makes it easy to create numbered and bulleted lists. People familiar with HTML
call a numbered list an ordered list, and tag it with the <ol> pair (and Web browsers put in
the numbers for you). They call a bulleted list an unordered list, and tag it with the <ul>
pair (and Web browsers put in the bullets for you). Lists also require the single tag <li>,
which precedes each list entry. Figure 26.4 shows the result of this code snippet for an
unordered list:
<ui>
<li>Monty Python's The Penguin on the Telly and the Death of Mary Queen of Scotts.
<li>Anatole France's Penguin Island, translated into English by A. W. Evans.
</ul>
Ingrid's Penguin Page — ' — ^ ' ~ ~
I ^j|^] iRi URL:
• Monty Python’s The Penguin on the Telly and the Death of Mary Queen
of Scotts.
• Anatole France’s Penguin Island, translated into English by A. W. Evans.
5
Figure 26,4 The <ul> and <Ii> tags turn into a bulleted list.
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 491
A glossary is a fancy list of terms and definitions (see figure 26.5). In HTML, the <dl> tag
surrounds a glossary (think of dl as standing for Definition List), the <dt> tag begins a
term, and the <dd> tag begins a definition, usually indented from the term. To see how
the tags work, check out this sample;
<dl> 6? Creating
^ Your Web
<dt>The Penguin on the Telly and the Death of Queen Mary of Scotts ^ Page
<dd>The first time I heard this Monty Python skit, I laughed so hard that I fell off my chair.
<dt>Penguin Island
<dd>I've never read this book by Anatole France, but I've always wanted to.
</dl>
Ingrid's Penguin Page
jumr (3 gl
H 0
I URL:
file: ///Hermes/ISKM/Flguras/sp«claI .htnl
The Penguin on the Telly and the Death of Queen Mary of Scotts
The first time I heard this Monty Python skit, I laughed so hard that I fell
off my chair.
Penguin Island
I've never read this book by Anatole France, but I've always wanted to.
Figure 26.5 The <dl>, <dl>, and <dd> tags turn into a glossary-like list.
Addresses — Snail Mail and Email
It's polite to end your home page with contact information so viewers can get in touch
with you. If you include a snail mail address, you might enclose it in the <address> tag
pair.
A snail mail address has a solid, traditional feel to it, but sharing your email address
usually makes more sense. You can, of course, just type your email address in the text of
your page, but just typing your email address brands you as a rank novice when it comes
to HTML; instead, you should make a mailto link, which some Web browsers can use.
Figure 26.6 shows the bottom of a Web page, complete with a mailto link.
Note
492 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
IP
• ' , , = Ingrid's Penguin Page ■ lag
juat
a®
fl le: ///Hermes/ ISK 3/lngr Id.html
IngrM Penguin
One Herring Lane, Snowy Patch ^27
Frosty City South Poie
ing rid@tidbits.com
m
£=•
&
Figure 26.6 A snail mail and email address, displayed in a Web broioser.
Take a look at the code behind figure 26.6:
<address>Ingrid Penguin
<br>One Herring Lane, Snowy Patch #27
<br>Frosty City, South Pole</address>
<br><a href=*mailto:ingrid@tidbits.com*>ingrid@tidbits.com</a>
The first part of the code shows the <address> tag pair in action, and the last line shows
an example of an anchor tag pair, which gets coded with <a>...text...</a>. Anchor tags
can do many different things in HTML, and I talk more about them in the Links section of
this chapter.
In this example, the anchor tag links to an email address, and the anchor tag does this by
including an attribute inside the beginning tag. An attribute gives a Web browser more
information about the tag. In this case, the attribute is an href, and it specifies that the text
between the tags should appear as a link (href stands for Hypertextual REFerence). If
someone clicks the link, the Web browser brings up a window or calls another program to
send email, with ingrid@tidbits . com in the To field.
Some broiosers don't support mail to URLs, and others do support them but must be set up
correctly. Fortunately, if a reader's browser doesn't work with mailto URLs, he can still see
the email address and transcribe it manually.
Typographical Styles
As Mac users, we are accustomed to having options for styling text every which way.
Most traditional design advice that Tve read about styling cautions against using too
many formats on one page, and that caution holds true for HTML as well. Fortunately,
Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 493
HTML offers far fewer formatting choices, and your chances of committing a typographi-
cal /rtia* pas are far less, especially if you remember that italic usually looks lousy onscreen.
HTML's typographical tags come in two main categories: physical and logical. Physical
tags dictate exactly what the text should look like (assuming the browser can display it).
HTML offers physical tags for:
■ Bold: <b>... text... </b>
■ Italic: <i>... text... </i>
■ Underline: <u>.. .text... </u>
■ Typewriter: <tt>...text...</tt> (displays text in a monospaced font)
Because the point of HTML is to convey meaning and structure, it makes sense to use
logical typographical tags instead of physical ones.
Here are some of the more useful logical tags:
■ Emphasize: <em>...text...</em> (use instead of italic)
■ Strong: <strong>...text...</strong> (use instead of bold)
■ Cite: <cite>..,text...</cite> (for book titles and the like)
If you write a software tutorial in HTML, you might also use these logical tags:
■ Code: <code>...text...</ code> (for bits of programming code)
■ Keyboard: <kbd>...text...</kbd> (for text to be typed)
■ Variable: <var>...text...</ var> (for customized text to be typed, such as an email
address)
■ Sample: <samp>...text...</samp> (for a message returned by a computer)
Never use a heading tag where you should use a strong or emphasis tag instead. A heading
tag may make the text look big and important in some browsers, but it zvill look just plain
stupid in other browsers. Also, some Web pages are devoted to sharing lists of badly done
Web pages, and I'd hate for your page to end up on one of those lists.
http://turnpike.net/fnetro/fnirsky/Worst.html
2^ Creating
Your Web
< Page
Note
494 hitermt Starter Kit for Macintosh
Entities — Coding for Special Characters
First, the good news — most normal every day text characters work fine. You just type
them in the body of your HTML document. Second, the bad news — you do have to code
for HTML's four reserved characters (>, <, ”, and &) and for upper ASCII character set
characters.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and the lower ASCII
character set, also known as 7-bit ASCII, consists of 128 characters, each with an assigned
number. Of those 128 characters, about 100 are for letters and numbers that people use.
On an English keyboard, pretty much any character that appears is part of lower ASCII;
with non-English keyboards, your mileage may vary considerably.
The upper ASCII character set adds another 128 characters to the lower ASCII character
set, and the lower and upper ASCII character sets are collectively known as 8-bit ASCII.
Bullets, accented characters, and other special characters come from upper ASCII. Unfor-
tunately, different computers and programs use different upper ASCII character sets.
When you type an upper ASCII character on the Mac, it's unlikely to be the same charac-
ter when viewed through a Web browser, which uses a standard called ISO Latin-1 for its
upper ASCII characters.
Named and Numbered Entities
You can tag for several upper ASCII characters with named entities. A named entity is a
special code that begins with an ampersand, continues with a name, and ends with a
semicolon. Table 26.1 shows a few examples of named entities. You can find a full list of
ISO Latin-1 characters and their entities at:
http; //w\'/w.\v3.org/hypertext/V//W/MarkUp/IS0lat1 .html
Table 26.1
Tagging for upper ASCII characters
Character
Named entity
a
á
e
é
h
ñ
You can also specify ISO Latin-1 characters using numbered entities (where numbers
specify the characters), but Web browsers frequently fail to display them correctly, so I
recommend that you do not use them.
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 495
Reserved Characters
HTML reserves four characters for its tags, and you can't always use those characters as
regular text and have them come out right. The reserved characters are the left angle
bracket (<), the right angle bracket (>), the straight double quote (") and the ampersand
(&). To code for these characters, use special named entities (see Table 26.2). jp creating
Your Web
< Page
Table 26.2
Tagging for reserved characters
Character
Tag
<
<
>
&
&
ii
"
Quotations
If you put a long quotation on a Web page, you might set it off in a special way, using the
<blockquote> pair. Web browsers typically indent or italicize blockquoted text.
If you want quotation marks to surround a quote, use the double quotation mark entity
(") that I explained previously. Many Web browsers will display a double straight
quote even if you type ” and don't use the entity, but it's considered bad form not to use
the entity.
If you use a word processor to type HTML and the word processor automatically types
curly quotes when you press the quote key, you must turn off the curly quotes. Look for a
Preferences or Options command, or if your program has an automatic-correction feature,
this may be where you turn off curly quotes. You might also set the automatic-correction
feature (or a glossary feature) to automatically type " when you type
Preformatted Text, Specially Formatted Text, and
HTML 3.0
"But, but, but..." you may be sputtering. "I need some text to appear in Web browsers
exactly the way it shows on my computer." For example, if you need to present tabular
information in a monospaced font (such as Monaco), you don't want the font to turn into
a proportional font (such as Times) up on the Web, because your carefully aligned col-
umns will turn into alphabet soup. Luckily, help is at hand, in the form of the <pre> tag
pair. Surround your text with the <pre> tag pair, and it will display in a monospaced font,
exactly as you typed it. You won't even need to use <br> or <p> tags.
Note
496 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If you aren't worried about presenting tabular information, but do want to totally control
the look of your text, consider creating a graphic and displaying the graphic on your Web
page (graphics are covered a little later in this chapter).
As I write this, HTML is at version 2.0, but a finalized HTML 3.0 is coming soon. HTML
3.0 will specify more layout- and typographically-oriented tags (probably including tags
for tables and fonts), and some Web browsers (most notably Netscape) already support
additional formatting tags, many of which may appear in HTML 3.0. If you are interested
in this topic I strongly recommend that you read the Introduction to the HyperText
Markup Language Specification Version 3.0.
http : / /wvAV. hpl . hp . CO . uk/people/dsr/html/Contents . html
Also, Netscape Communications has posted information about additional tags supported
by its browsers.
http: / /home . netscape . com/assist /net_sites/html_extensions . html
In case you were wondering, to make forms (which display fill-in fields, checkboxes, radio
buttons, and so on) you use special HTML tags. To make the forms work, you must set them
up to interact with a Web server, a task which— unfortunately— is bexjond the scope of this
book.
Tags for Links
If you absorbed most of the information about tags for text, you should be able to fire up a
word processor and use the information to make a simple HTML document with headings,
lists, emphasized text, and so on. Armed with that knowledge, you can make lots of simple
Web pages, but few Web pages feel complete without links. Links are in many ways the
most interesting part of the Web. Links enable you to move quickly from one place to
another on the Web. If you serve your Web page from a site in San Francisco, but make a
link to a Web page stored on a machine in London, someone clicking on your link is
instantly (or somewhat instantly) able to look at the page stored in London. Links come in
three flavors: links to other pages, links to other Internet resources, and links within a page.
Linking to Other Pages
To make a link to a different page, you need to know the URL of that page. If the page
isn't part of your Web site, use a Web browser to find the page, and then copy the URL.
You can then paste the URL into your HTML code. The Live from Antarctica link shown
in figure 26.7 has the following code:
Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 497
<li><a href=''http: //quest. arc. nasa.gov/livef rom/livefrom.html''>Live from Antartica</a>
The first <a> tag has an href attribute (href stands for Hypertextual REFerence). The href ? CreaHng
attribute tells a Web browser what to do with the link, and in this case it tells the browser ^ Your Web
.. 5 Page
to jump to http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/livefrom/livefrom.html if someone clicks ^
the text between the two <a> tags.
Figure 26.7 Web browsers usually display linked text in a different color and with an
underline.
To create a link to another page on your Web site, don't use the usual full URL in the href
attribute; instead, use a relative URL A relative URL doesn't include the name of the
server, and it only includes enough of the path to clarify where the other Web page is.
If all this talk of URLs is making your bead swim, skip back to chapter 6, "Addressing &
URLs" for a discussion of the various parts of a URL.
For example, I serve my friend Geoff's home page from my Web site. The full URL to
Geoff's page is:
http : / / king .tidbits . com/geof f /geof f . html
My home page is also on my server, but it's not in the geoff folder, so the link from my
home page to Geoff's home page has a relative URL, like this:
<a href =" /geof f /geof f . html">Geoff</a>
Note
498 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
This relative URL tells a browser to go back to the root directory, then into the geoff
folder, and finally to the geoff.html document. It doesn't include http://king.lidbits.com
because both pages are on the same serv^er.
As another example, Geoff has a file in his geoff folder called reno.html (Geoff grew up in
Nevada), and the link from Geoff's geoff.html home page to his reno page, looks like this:
<a href='reno.html">Reno, Nevada</a>
Because the document called reno.html is in the same folder as the geoff.html document,
the relative URL doesn't need to include http:/king.tidbits.com/geoff/. It only needs to
include reno.html, the name of the document that you see if you click the Reno, Nevada
link.
If you are making a simple home page with a few related HTML documents and graphics,
store all thefdes in the same folder on your Mac. The people who serve your files will almost
certainly keep them in the same folder, and your relative URLs will work like a charm when
you test them and when they go live on the Web. Use the same h/pe of relative link that Geoff
uses for his reno.html document.
If you need to do relative URLs that go back to the root and then down a different path, ask
the people who ivill setve your page how you should handle the URL.
Links to Other Internet Resources
You can make a link to anything that has a URL, although many Web browsers have
trouble with FTP URLs. If you give an FTP URL, be sure to also mention the URL in the
regular text of the Web page. Links to Gopher files tend to work well although be careful
since Gopher URLs are usually extremely ugly and hard to retype correctly. The code
below shows the HTML for an unordered list with links to two Gopher items, and figure
26.8 shows what the list looks like in a Web browser.
<ul>
<li>Monty Python ‘ s <cite><a href =''gopher : / /ocf . berkeley . edu : 70/00/ Library /Monty_Python/penguin
">The Penguin on the Telly and the Death of Mary Queen of Scotts.</a></cite>
<li>Anatole France ' s<cite><a href=''gopher: / /gopher .vt .edu: 10010/02/84/1 ">Penguin Island, </a></
cite> translated into English by A. VL Evans.
</ul>
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 499
Ingrid's Penguin Page ^-'1 =
^■lii
jojmt
n lo: ///Hermes/ ISKM/Ingrld.hlml
Penguins in Literature
• Monty Python's 7'Ae‘ PenmUn on TeJJy ami of Mary
Ov^j} o/Scotts.
• Anatole France fsi/anii . translated into English by A. W.
Evans.
c:
a
Creating
Your Web
Page
Figure 26.8 An unordered list with links to Gopher items.
Links within a Web Page
You also can use links to help people get around within a page. For example, you might
make a linked table of contents of <hl>- or <h2>-tagged titles.
To create an internal link, you first do some special HTML tagging at the target of the link.
The target is where viewers end up after they click. Here's an example:
<h2><a name="other penguins">Other Penguins on the V/eb</a></h2>
In the example. Other Penguins on the Web is surrounded by an <a> tag pair, with a
name attribute. The name attribute gives the target the name other penguins.
After naming the target, you set up the link like this:
This page has additional <a href=’’/^other penguins''>information</a> about penguins on
the Web.
When someone views the link, the text between the <a> tags appears underlined. The <a>
tags are a bit unusual, because the beginning tag has a special href attribute, which
includes #other penguins, the target name that you set up at the target of the link. If
someone clicks the underlined word "information," the Web browser will look for the
other penguins target that you set up on the same page.
500 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Web Graphics
When you put graphics on a Web page, you can do so in two ways: inline or external.
Inline graphics display on the page, right "in line" with other text on the same line,
should you choose to put text on that line. External graphics don't show on a page;
instead, they show in a separate window, usually the window of a helper application
like JPEGView (see chapter 25, "World Wide Web").
Today's crop of Web browsers limits you to viewing two graphic formats: GIF and JPEG.
Both formats use internal compression routines that make the graphics smaller, thus
decreasing download times. When you put a graphic on the Web, you have to decide
whether to use GIF or JPEG. The short answer is that you want to use GIF, though JPEG
images have a place in some situations, and may play a greater role in the future.
GIF versus JPEG
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is the only format that all graphics-savvy
Web browsers can display inline, so it's the one to use for graphics that you want eveiy^-
one to see. The bad part about GIF graphics is that they are limited to 256 colors and
typically don't compress as well as JPEG graphics do.
The latest version of the GIF specification (version 89a) supports transparent mode, a nifty^
option that lets you make one color in a graphic transparent. GIFs are shaped like rect-
angles, but if you make a GIF's background color transparent, you can end up with a GIF
that looks like an irregularly shaped object, such as a penguin (see figure 26.9).
Ingrid*s Penguin Page
jojat gjg) [g
K
Figure 26.9 Ingrid with a transparent background versus Ingrid luith a dark back-
ground.
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 501
GIFs also can be interlaced, meaning the image is saved in alternating horizontal bands. If
you looked at the first half of an interlaced GIF, you would see a low-resolution, striped
image, with blank horizontal stripes representing the second half of the image. Some Web
browsers display interlaced GIFs as they read them — first they display every eighth line,
then every fourth line, then every second line, and then every line. This display method
makes it so people waiting for the image to load can quickly make out what the final
image will look like. Other browsers bring in a rough version of the graphic and gradu-
ally refine it.
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It is a graphics compression format that
works best for digitized photographs, particularly if they depict photos of natural scenes,
such as forests or sunsets. JPEG is a lossy format, meaning that when it does its compres-
sion magic, it loses some of the detail in the graphic. JPEG was designed to lose details
that the human eye won't notice, particularly details that wouldn't be noticed from an
image with gradual changes in shading and color. Sometimes the loss of detail means the
graphic looks fuzzy; other times you can't tell at all. JPEG is most likely to lose too much
detail with images that have sudden transitions from one color to another, so JPEG tends
to be a poor format for graphics containing text, line drawings, and navigational icons.
JPEG images can have millions of colors instead of a measly 256. They have better com-
pression, but many browsers can't display them without the assistance of a helper appli-
cation (where the picture displays in a different program's window).
The bottom line: Use GIF unless you have a photograph that looks much nicer or com-
presses significantly tighter as a JPEG.
Converting Images into GIF or JPEG Format
Lots of commercial graphics programs can save in GIF or JPEG format, and if you own
Photoshop, Color It!, or any of a number of other applications, you can save files as GIFs
or JPEGs. If your collection of graphics programs can't Save As to GIF or JPEG format (or
doesn't offer special options such as interlacing or transparencies), pick up a utility from
the Internet that does it for you. Except for the Interactive Graphics Renderer (which you
use through a Web site), the utilities mentioned in this section are available on the Info-
Mac archives and at the FTP site for this book.
ftp: / /ftp. tidbits . com/ pub/ tidbits/tisk/ util/
Graphic Converter
Graphic Converter is my favorite utility for working with Web graphics because it offers
the most features of any of the non-commercial programs (although clip2gif is simpler to
use and offers a number of the key features). See figure 26.10. Graphic Converter can open
PICTs, TIFFs, JPEGs, GIFs, and a whole menagerie of less common formats.
Creating
Your Web
Page
502
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
1
. 5= i .;
1 Size: 96x101
Original Size: 96x101
Resolution : 72x72dpi
Colors : 256 Colors (8 Bit)
Frames:
Memory : 9.5KB
File Format: GIF89a
File Length: 4.0KB
Req. Time: 0.2s
Comment :
Figure 26.10 Graphic Converter's basic interface shows the image, a "toolbox," and
an Information palette.
Graphic Converter has more extensive editing features than other shareware and
freeware options and offers all the important features specific to Web graphics:
■ You can save in GIF or JPEG format (to be saved as a GIF, your image cannot
contain more than 256 colors; switch to fewer colors by choosing 256 Colors (8 bit)
from the Colors hierarchical menu on the Picture menu).
■ You can make a graphic smaller by selecting around the edge of the image, and
then — in the Save As dialog box — turning on the Save Only Selection checkbox.
■ In the Save As dialog box, you can use the Options button to save GIFs as interlaced
or non-interlaced, and to set the quality level of a JPEG (lower quality translates to a
smaller image, which will download more quickly).
■ To make one color transparent, drop-down the Picture menu, choose Colors, and
then choose Transparent GIF Color. Check the Transparent checkbox and click the
color you want to turn transparent. After you click the OK button to exit the Trans-
parent GIF Settings dialog box, the image may not look different, but it will display
correctly in a Web browser.
■ To convert many images from one format to another, try the Convert More com-
mand in the File menu.
Currently, Graphic Converter 2.0.9 runs on Power Macs in emulation. Thorsten Lemke,
the author, recently released a beta PowerPC-native version, which may be in final form
by the time you read this book. Graphic Converter is shareware, and it costs $30 to $35,
depending on where you live.
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 503
clip2gif
Written by Yves Piguet, clip2gif is a clever utility that
converts PICTs (either singly or in batches) to GIFs or
JPEGs. It can give GIF files a transparent background
and make them interlaced. Also, clip2gif works with
AppleScript, and you can use it in scripts to do
conversions and create simple graphics. Yves requests
that you send “postcards, email, or banknotes” If you
use the program.
<
GIFConverter
GIFConverter, a $40 shareware program from Kevin
Mitchell, enables you to open a variety of file formats.
Including GIF, PICT, TIFF, and JPEG. GIFConverter has a
few editing options, and lets you save in GIF or JPEG
format. When you save In GIF format. In the Save As
dialog box, click the Options button to indicate whether
you want the graphic interlaced.
Interactive Graphics Renderer
Interactive Graphics Renderer Is a wonderful
commentware Web page and GIF generator for
personal use from Patrick J. Hennessey at the Kansas
State University of Electrical Engineering. Interactive
Graphics Renderer helps you make your own GIF-
format horizontal rules and bullets in a variety of
rendered colors and shapes. To download your GIF,
simply click the Gimme! button. You may need to
configure your browser to v/ork with the MIME type
used by the Renderer; I set mine to Stuffit Expander
and it worked fine.
j InternctluB mililiJ graphics generator .
juat i
!Ii
UPt:
Curr«nt graphic (35*35)
o
1 6 color image
£
Object rotation (in degrees): X: | D | Y: I 0 I Z [ D I
I 16 color '^\ I Glgentlc"^ | Torue
▼1 I Bare color
p"«y ^1
Ba» Color 1 HiBCK
Surface properties;
Mix Color 1 umiie
1 Smooth '^1 1
Mololllc ^11 Intcnsolg bright
Source Location;
http :/ /wvw . eece . ksu . edu / IGR / intro . html
Transparency
Transparency 1.0, freeware from Aaron Giles, enables
you to make one of the colors in a GIF transparent.
Transparency doesn’t try to do anything else, and it’s
easy to use — just drag the icon of a GIF onto the
Transparency Icon. Transparency launches and
displays the image. Click and hold on the background
color and watch as Transparency pops up a palette
showing the colors in the image with the color you
selected. Release the mouse button, and Transpar-
ency makes the selected color transparent.
Creating
Your Web
Page
504 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Tags for an Inline Graphic
As I hope you recall, any Web browser that can display graphics will show an inline
graphic right on a page. Inline graphics use an <img> tag, and the <img> tag usually has
a few attributes inside it. Here's an example:
<img src=“ingrid.gif “ align=bottom alt=*I have expressive eyes with long eyelashes. '>
Here's what's going on with the attributes in the example:
■ src=”ingrid.gif * specifies the source of the image as a file called ingrid.gif (always
name GIFs with a .gif extension). The source should always be given as URL. In this
case, I used a relative URL to a GIF in the same folder as the HTML document that
will show the GIF. (Flip back to the Links section to find out more about relative
URLs.)
■ align=bottom lines up other text on the same line as the graphic with the bottom of
the graphic. You could also use align=top or align=center (see figure 26.11).
Ingrid's Penguin Page
\MkB 51 [j]
fi le:
\IIIHb
This is what I look like.
U
\\
m ijai
U
\
\ \
101
Ingrid s Penguin Page
ag] la E
URL:
fi le:
///He
J9^
J
\\ This is what I look like.
This is what I look like.
c
Figure 26.11 Inline images can be aligned at the top, center, or bottom of their lines.
alt='T have expressive eyes with long eyelashes." specifies text people see if their
browsers can't display the image.
Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 505
You can make an inline image act as a link by enclosing it in <a> tags like this:
<a href="more.html'><img src="ingrid.gif ** align=bottofn alt=*I have expressive eyes with
long eyelashes. "></a>
a.
<
This link causes a browser to open a file called more.html after someone clicks the ingrid.gif
image.
An inline image can also be the target of a link— just use the name attribute in the <a> tag,
like this:
<a name=’’picture''><img src="ingrid.gif " align=bottom alt="I have expressive eyes with
long eyelashes. ''x/a>
In this case, someone could create a link that would cause a browser to jump to the place
where ingrid.gif is displayed. The link loould include an href="ttpicture" attribute.
Lots of Web pages use small GIFs as bullets and as navigational devices (such as arrows);
these GIFs are sometimes called picons. You can make your own picons in a graphics
program (just save them as GIFs), or you can download them from Web pages people
have set up in order to share them.
http : / /WWW. uncg . edu : 80/-rdralph /icons/
http : / /v/ww. ncsa . uiuc . edu/General/ Icons/
http://helix.rice.edu/Icons/
Horizontal Lines
In Web-author jargon, a horizontal line across the page is a horizontal rule, and you code
for it using the <hr> tag. Web authors frequently use horizontal rules to visually separate
topics. To make a rule, just stick <hr> where you want the rule to go. Here's the HTML
code for the horizontal rule shown in figure 26.12:
<p><strong>Motto: V/hy eat chocolate when you can eat fish instead?</strong>
<hr>
My name is Ingrid. Besides <a href=“#recipe">eating fish,</a> my hobbies
Creating
Your Web
Page
Note
506
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
•• ^ Ingrid'S Penguin Page
fi le; ///Harmes/ISKM/I ngrld.html
Motto: Why eat chocolate when you can eat fish instead?
1
My name Is Ingrid. Besides eating fish, my hobbles include swimming, waddling
i_ — : — Lizj ;|ct>
Figure 26.12 A Web browser interprets the <hr> tag by displaying a horizontal line.
If you've spent much time hanging out on the Web, you've almost certainly noticed that
some Web pages have colorful or whimsical horizontal rules. These horizontal rules are
actually inline GIFs. Not only do they liven up Web pages, but they also exist, often free for
the taking, in Web-based collections sprinkled all over the globe.
http : / /WWW. cs . vu . nl/-dsbouma / rulers . html
http://www.uncg.edu/-rdralph/icons/bars/
The Netscape HTML extended tag set has attributes for the <hr> tag that enable you to
modify the appearance of a horizontal rule. Currently, only Netscape can show the
modifications, but this may change, especially if these attributes end up in HTML 3.0. As
an example of a line you could make, consider the following code:
<hr size=20 width=288 align=center noshade>
Figure 26.13 shows what such a horizontal rule would look like in Netscape.
Ingrld's Penguln Page
Motto: Why eat chocolate when you can eat fish instead?
±
IHHHHHIHHIHHHHHi
My name is Ingrid. Besides eating fish, my hobbies include swimming.
^ 1' ■
Figure 26.13 This horizontal rule, as interpreted by Netscape, is 20 pixels high, 288
pixels wide, center-aligned, and not shaded.
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 507
Briefly, here's how each attribute works:
■ Size sets the height of the line in pixels (figure on about 72 pixels per inch).
■ Width sets the width of the line. You can use a measurement in pixels (as I did in the
code for figure 26.13), or you can specify a percentage of the page width. If you
specify a percentage, put a percent sign after the number.
■ Align=center centers the line on the page (since I shortened the width, I can now
choose how the line aligns). You can also use align=left or align=right.
■ Because Netscape shades its horizontal rules, and because the shading can take a bit
of getting used to, you can use the noshade attribute to turn off shading.
As another example of how you might use these attributes, figure 26.14 shows a coded
<hr> tag:
<hr size=20 width=75% align=left>
Figure 26.14 This horizontal rule, as interpreted by Netscape, is 20 pixels high, 75
percent as wide as the page, left-aligned, and shaded.
Tags for an External Graphic
An external graphic would typically be a JPEG image, and you would link to it just as you
would link to any other Internet resource (as explained earlier in the section about link-
ing), by using an <a> tag with an href attribute as follows:
<a href =”ingrid. jpeg" >A JPEG image of a penguin, 72K</a>
Creating
Your Web
Page
Name your JPEG with a .jpg or .jpeg extension. Consider saving your JPEG as a separate,
small GIF image and placing the GIF image inline on your Web page. You can then make
508 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
the GIF link to the JPEG such that people can click the GIF image in order to view the
JPEG, You might also display the size of the JPEG so people know what they are getting
into before clicking the link. The necessary code might look like:
<a href="ingrid. jpeg"><img src="ingrid .gif " align=bottom >Ingrid the penguin, (72K)</a>
For example, the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has an
extensive Web site that shows drawings, photographs, and notes made by Louis Agassiz
Fuertes while on a trip to Alaska. Most of the links available from the site's home page
lead to pages of GIFs, and each GIF acts as a link to a larger, more detailed JPEG.
http : / / rmc *v/ww. library . Cornell . edu/Alaska . Index . html
Z Graphics that have more than one place that you can click on to go to more than one place on
® the Web are called ISMAP graphics, and to create one, you must set it up with a Web server,
ft) Fun as ISMAPs may be, they are beyond the scope of this chapter.
Sound and Video Links
Just as you can make a link to an external graphic, you can make a link to an external
sound or video file, and the syntax is exactly the same. To share a sound or video with
the world, you must save it in an appropriate format and name it with the corresponding
extension. This section mentions a few utilities that help you work with sounds and
movies, and they are all available on the Info-Mac archives and the TidBITS FTP
directory:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Two reasonably universal sound formats are Sun au, a somewhat scratchy, 8-bit format,
and the less-common MPEG audio, which sounds nicer. To ensure that most of the
listeners can hear your sounds, I recommend you use one of these formats.
If you work with sounds, you might try Rod Kennedy's freeware SoundMachine, which
can record in Sun au format. Name Sun au files with a .au extension; MPEG audio files
with . mp2. Web 66 has a nice tutorial about recording sounds for the Web:
http : / /web66 . coled . umn . edu /Cookbook /Sounds /Sounds . html
Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 509
Movies also have two fairly universal formats, QuickTime and MPEG. If you put a
Macintosh QuickTime movie up the Web, you must first flatten it, that is, run it through a
program that moves all the data into the data fork (all Mac files have a data fork and a
resource fork). A popular utility for flattening movies is Robert Hennessy's freeware
flattenMooV. You might also check out Maynard Handley's Sparkle, a freeware program
that has some support for converting movies between MPEG and QuickTime formats.
QuickTime files need a .mov extension; MPEGs a .mpg or .mpeg extension.
Copying HTML
Given that the future of Web authoring holds lots of changes and new coding possibili-
ties, as you browse the Web, you will almost certainly see pages with formats I didn't
explain in this chapter. Luckily, it's considered reasonable practice to look at the code
behind a Web page and adapt it to your own content. You can even paste the code
directly into your own HTML document. Each browser has a slightly different technique
for viewing the code behind the displayed page:
■ MacWeb: Drop down the Options menu, choose the View Source hierarchical menu,
and then choose Retrieved.
■ Mosaic: From the File menu, choose View Source.
■ Netscape: From the View menu, choose Source.
Although copying HTML code and not crediting the source is considered aboveboard,
copying graphics, sounds, and movies is a controversial topic. My advice is to freely copy
sounds, graphics, or movies from sites where the author openly encourages it, and be sure to
read the page carefully to find out whether the author wants credit. Othenoise, ask first.
Web Page Content
When you set up your personal page, unless you have a corporate lawyer looking over
your shoulder, I urge you to loosen up, share something about yourself, and have fun. If
you are setting up a page for an organization, the page should — of course — reflect the
tone of the organization. Here are a few specific suggestions:
■ Make it easy for people to figure out what's on your page if they locate it through a
search engine. Most search engines return a page's title, URL, and the first few lines
of text, so give your page a descriptive title and summarize the content in the first
paragraph.
■ Think of the top six inches or so of your Web page as a book's cover and introduc-
tion. They should let people know what's interesting about your page and encour-
age them to continue reading.
Part IV
Note
510 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
■ If your page is more than a few average screens long, consider breaking it up into
several pages, and make links to help people navigate among the pages.
■ Contribute content of your own. For example, if you love toasters, don't just put in
links to other toaster pages. The links are fine, but you might also include your top
ten tips for toaster care. If you are setting up a page for an organization, include
information about a topic the organization specializes in. For example, the Web site
for a hardware store might post articles about how to use different tools.
■ Include contact information. Use a mailto link in an anchor tag to make your email
address live. Including your email address is a great way to get feedback and meet
people who share your interests.
■ Don't include links that don't go anywhere.
■ If you post timely information, provide a date, so people know when it was last
updated. Don't use a date format like 1/2/96 — some people take that to mean
January 2, others take it to mean February 1. To be safe, use a format like 02-Feb-96.
■ If you want people to return to your site, set yourself up as doing something new
(such as a column or cartoon) on a regular basis. Then, make sure you do it.
■ Make sure your page will work for people who cannot use graphics or who do not
have the latest popular browser. If you don't want your page to look plain stupid to
thousands of people, think carefully about what tags you use. You can always make
separate pages, one for people running this season's fashionable browser, and one
for everyone else.
Testing Tags
After you've written an HTML document and have it stored on your hard disk, test it by
opening it in a Web browser. If your HTML document works fine in testing, you can then
send it to the organization who will be serving it to everyone on the Internet.
Most of the time, you send files to a Web server by uploading them to a specific directory
using an FTP client like Anarchic or Fetch. Make sure to upload the .html files in ASCII
mode, and any images or other external files in straight binary mode, not MacBinary mode.
If you use a modem to connect to the Internet, you may not want to be connected while
you do the testing. If you launch a Web browser while you are not connected, you'll most
likely get an error message, though in most cases you can ignore the error message and
view files on your hard disk. Even so, to avoid the error message, you might try:
■ Set your home page to nothing or to a file on your hard disk.
■ Launch the browser by dragging and dropping the HTML document's icon over the
Web browser's icon.
Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 511
Besides the drag and drop method, try these techniques for opening files on your hard
disk into MacWeb, Mosaic, and Netscape. Unfortunately, if the programs change how
they work before you read this, you'll have to improvise:
■ MacWeb: Choose Open from the File menu.
■ NCSA Mosaic: From the File menu, choose Open Local. S? Creating
3- Your Web
■ Netscape: From the File menu, choose Open File. In later versions of Netscape, you ^ Page
can also drag and drop an HTML document icon on the Netscape browser window.
If a broioser won't open an HTML document, make sure the file name ends with . html. For
example, you might name a file PenguinPage • html. Also, GIF files should end with . gif,
and JPEG files should end with - jpeg or - jpg.
Troubleshooting Tips
HTML code is usually easy to fix, it's just a matter of staring at it until you figure out the
problem. Here are a few' tips to speed up the process:
■ Make sure ending tags have front slashes in them (the slash that's on the same key
as the question mark).
■ Make sure ordered, unordered, and definition lists end with ending tags.
■ If you are working in a word processor, make sure you saved the file in text format.
If you use an HTML authoring program that includes a quick-preview for view^ing
documents in a Web browser, your relative links may not w'ork when you do the preview
because the authoring programs tend to create a temporary file and ask the browser to
open that, rather than use the actual file you're editing. To avoid the problem, open the
file you want to view' into your browser w'ithout the help of an HTML authoring pro-
gram; drag and drop is often the easiest method.
Also, if you are preparing a high-profile page, consider checking it in several brow'sers on
more than one type of computer. Different browsers interpret HTML differently, and
brow^sers differ in their tolerance of minor errors. Also, graphics may display completely
differently on different types of computers.
External Approval
If you can't figure out w'hat's wrong w'ith your code or you want a rigorous check, you
can submit your code to various forms-based Web pages and they will spit back sugges-
tions for improvement. I prefer Weblint because it gives errors by line and displays
HTML code by line.
512 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
http : / /Nw/w. unipress . com/web - lint /
http://wvw.stolaf.edu/misc/html-check/
http: / /wvw. vilspa . esa . es/div/help/ validation -form. html
Publicizing Your Page
Once your page is up and running, you'll want to spread the word so other people will
browse it. If your email program lets you set up an automatic signature, you can put your
URL in your signature. You can also register your page with many of the Web searching
services (such as Yahoo or WebCrawler). If you have links on your page to other related
pages, send email to the authors of those pages and ask them to make links back to your
page. For additional ways to publicize your pages, clieck out:
http : / /vww. cen . uiuc . edu/-banister/ submit - it/
http : / / home . mcom . com/escapes /submit_new. html
http : / /w\'w. uwtc .Washington . edu/Computing/V/WW/AnnouncingYourSite . html
HTML Converters
If you use an existing word processing program, text editor, or desktop publishing
program for creating documents that you want to then add HTML code to, you might try
an HTML converter that converts your document to a text file and attempts to insert
appropriate HTML tags. Particularly if you use a word processing program, it may export
to either RTF (which stands for Rich Text Format and is also known as Interchange Format)
or to XTND (pronounced "extend").
RTF Converters
rtftohtml, written by Chris Hector, converts graphics out of an RTF document into
separate PICT images. It also has sophisticated options for text; it has a lot to offer,
particularly if you are fairly comfortable with a word processing program and with
HTML.
ftp: //ftp.cray .com/ src/WWVi/stuff/ RTF/ rtf tohtml__overview.html
rtftohtml doesn't split one document into a series of appropriately connected Web pages,
so Christian Bolik wrote rtftoweb, which runs along with rtftohtml. It not only can split
out pages based on headings but also can add a table of contents, index, and consistent
navigational tools, rtftoweb's Web page says it hasn't yet been tested on the Mac (only on
Unix systems), so proceed with care.
Note
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 513
ftp://ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/pub/unix-local/misc/rtftoweb/html/rtftoweb.htinl
In case you were wondering about the URLs for rtftohtml and rtftoweb, the FTP at the start
of the URL does mean the pages are being served from FTP servers, but the .btml at the end
of the URL tells a Web browser to interpret the file as a normal Web page.
J? Creating
H Your Web
< Page
XTND Converters
If your word processing program can export to XTND, then it can use any HTML XTND
converter to save files into HTML format. If you want to try an XTND converter, I recom-
mend HTML + XTND, written by Leonard Rosenthol, a well-known member of the
Macintosh online community. I have used it on documents and have been happy with the
results. The converter also comes with clip2gif and with a program called
XTNDPostProcess, which you use to further improve the conversion. HTML + XTND
might be best described as weddingware — if you like it, send a contribution to Leonard's
wedding fund.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/html/
Another HTML translation option is the freeware XTND HTML translator by Brian A.
Sullivan and Jonathan Ryan Day. The translator works with any XTND-savvy program.
But it comes with a template for ClarisWorks, and its Web page includes a link to a
tutorial for using the translator with ClarisWorks. The newest version of the translator
isn't currently available; Brian and Jonathan are in the process of licensing it to a commer-
cial vendor.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/highc/software/translator/XTND_HTML_Translator.html
Programs with HTML Add-ons
When it comes to HTML coding, you can use a word processing program, text editor,
page layout program, HTML authoring program, HTML converter, or some combination.
If you use a word processing or desktop publishing program, remember to save the file as
text before you view it in a Web browser. If you find yourself frequently coding in HTML,
you can take advantage of typical word processing features — glossaries, macros, search-
ing, spell checking, and so on. If you don't think your word processing program is the
right tool for the job, you might check out other word processing programs, a text editor,
or some of the recent HTML authoring programs.
This section briefly (and alphabetically) lists different word processing programs, text
editors, and page layout programs that have add-ons for HTML tagging.
514 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Alpha
Alpha, a $25 shareware program by Peter Keheler, is a text editor primarily used by
programmers, and — although I have a friend who uses Alpha and a set of add-ons for
HTML — if you aren't a programmer or familiar with Alpha, I don't recommend it as your
HTML editor of choice. If you want to give it a spin, read the HTML Help file in the Help
folder.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
BBEdit and BBEdit Lite
BBEdit, a text editor written by Bare-Bones Software, supports extensions, add-ons that
enhance what it can do. BBEdit users currently can pick from two different sets of exten-
sions — BBEdit HTML Extensions, by Carles Bellver, and BBEdit HTML Tools, by Lindsay
Davies. At a recent Macintosh user group meeting in Seattle, I picked the brains of a few
people who do Web authoring. Several were enthused about BBEdit, and although they
said nice things about both sets of extensions, BBEdit HTML Tools currently has the edge
among people who use BBEdit for HTML. In particular, people commented favorably on
its forms support, flexibility, documentation, and overall interface. Lindsay recently
licensed BBEdit HTML Tools to Bare-Bones Software, and I expect BBEdit HTML Tools
will be included with BBEdit by the time you read this book.
http ;/ /v/w\v . uj i . es / bbedit • html - extensions . html
http ://v/ww. york.ac.uk/-ld1 1 /BBEditTools . html
You can get started with BBEdit using the freeware BBEdit Lite, or you can purchase the
commercial version for $119.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
FrameMaker
FrameMaker users who want to make documents that print out traditionally and go on
the Web might check out WebMaker, a reasonably sophisticated, high-end converter.
http: //v/ww.f rame.com/
http: //v/ww.cern.ch /WebMaker/
Microsoft Word
In Word 4 or 5, use the Glossary and Commands options to automate some HTML tag
insertion. In Word 6, you might combine the AutoCorrect, AutoText, Customize, and
macro features to speed HTML coding.
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 515
http; //WWW. microsoft.com/
If you use Word 6, Dan Berrios's AppleScript-based msw to html converter may prove
attractive. It intelligently converts a number of document elements including heading
styles, reserved characters, some character formats, bulleted lists, and numbered lists. It
also converts tables to the tags that will probably appear in the HTML 3.0 specification.
The converter comes with a ten-day evaluation period. After that, to get a functioning
copy, you'll need to pay your $15 shareware fee, or $50 for a site license.
2^ Creating
3* Your Web
< Page
http : / /dreyer . ucsf . edu/mswtohtml . html
You might also check out NICE Technologies's Web site, where the company offers a
demo version of WebWizard, a $79 Word 6 add-on that looks promising.
http : / /WWW. webcom . com/-nicetech/webware/webwiz . html
Microsoft does have a Web authoring tool, called Word Assistant, for Microsoft Word for
Windows, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a Macintosh version.
Nisus Writer
Nisus Writer is currently my favorite HTML authoring option, thanks to Sandra Silcot,
who wrote an excellent set of macros that work with Nisus Writer to tag text with HTML
codes. The macros are freeware for personal, non-profit, or educational use.
http : / /v/v/w. unimelb . edu . au /-ssilcot /Silcot sHTMLMacrosReadMe . html
Combine these macros with Nisus's sophisticated searching (it can even replace through
multiple documents at once), non-contiguous selection, and Ignore Spelling character
style, and you have an excellent HTML authoring tool. Nisus Writer even saves files with
all the formatting in the resource fork, so you don't have to save files as text for a Web
browser to load them.
http ; / /WWW. nisus • soft . com/ -nisus /index . html
PageMaker
Rumor has it that Adobe will soon ship an HTML utility for PageMaker, but if you are
looking for a third-party solution, you might try Dave, an AppleScript by Jeff Boulter, that
helps with converting PageMaker articles into HTML. According to Jeff, Dave is highly
customizable, but only works on 32K or smaller articles.
http://www.bucknell.edu/bucknellian/dave/
516 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You might also check out Mitch Cohen's WebSucker utility.
http : / /w\w/. iii . net /users/mcohen/v/ebsucker . html
QuarkXPress
Astrobyte's BeyondPress lets you map document elements to HTML elements such as
headings and blockquotes. You also can map styles to HTML tags, create links, and
convert images to GIF or JPEG format. Unlike most of the tools mentioned in this chapter,
with a $595 per copy price, BeyondPress isn't for the low-budget crowd.
http: //\WAV. astrobyte.com/
You can find a few less commercial possibilities on the Internet, including Quark to
HTML by Jeremy Hylton and HTML Xport by Eric Knudstrip.
http : / /the -tech .mit . edu/- j eremy /qt2vw\v. html
f tp : / /mars . aliens . com/pub/Macintosh/HTML_Xport . sit
Storyspace
Eastgate Systems' $245 Storyspace almost belongs in the HTML Authoring Programs
section of this chapter, but I included it here because it was a functional program before
the Web was but a glimmer in a few people's eyes. Storyspace enables you to create
hypertexts, and it is often used in academic and literary contexts. It can also export to
HTML and might be especially useful for creating Web sites that have many pages with
complex linkages.
http : / /wv/v/. eastgate . com/-eastgate/
HTML Authoring Programs
The current state of HTML authoring programs leaves much to be desired for people
interested in creating and managing multiple-page Web sites. Many programs don't
include necessary features and others are still in beta, making potentially useful features
too slow or quirky for serious authoring. Even so, several of these programs have a great
deal to offer to anyone wanting to make a few Web pages without memorizing lots of tags
and attributes. In the next year, I expect to see an explosion of Web authoring tools and an
increase in the quality of the tools. For now, here is an alphabetical list of the most prom-
ising or well-known of the available programs, with notes about what you can expect
from them. Most of the freeware and shareware is available from the Info-Mac archives
and from the FTP directory for the Internet Starter Kit. If you can't find a program in the
following FTP URL, try the program's home page.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/htfnl/
Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 517
Arachnid
Written by Robert McBurney, Arachnid has a lot of
potential. Arachnid goes for the WYSIWYG look,
meaning users don’t have to insert or view HTML
codes. Arachnid assumes you will create multiple,
related Web pages and wraps up a group of pages In
one “project.” Unfortunately, Arachnid's 1.0 release
won’t happen until after this book is printed, which
makes it difficult to get a feel for the program. The
betas I’ve used are extremely slow, but I plan to check
out the new versions as they come out. I hope Robert
will improve the speed and add a Replace option, a
way to insert custom tags, and add keyboard shortcuts
for most commands.
^ Creating
Your Web
< Page
http : / / sec - look . uiowa . edu /about /pro j ects /arachnid • page . html
AutoWeb
Dave Winer’s AutoWeb is unusual among the HTML
authoring tools because it doesn’t so much help you
write HTML as it creates an entire Web site for you.
Essentially, you feed AutoWeb a hierarchy of
Macintosh folders with text files in them, and AutoWeb
spits out a fully formed set of Web pages with all the
links and tables of contents created for you. The text
files do have to be In a slightly special format if you
want to include HTML codes like <hr>, but for the most
part AutoWeb is probably the easiest way of creating
an entire site from text files and maintaining it,
because It can update a site from updated files as
well. AutoWeb is actually a set of Frontier scripts and
relies on Frontier Runtime and a program called Little
Script Editor to do its work.
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http : / /WWW . hotwired . com/userland/autowebhome . html
HomeMaker
HomeMaker, written by Bernie Dodge, is a nicely-
done, freeware HyperCard stack that walks you
through creating a home page. Bernie intends the
stack not only for individuals, but also for organiza-
tions that want to provide members with a simple way
to make a home page that includes some standard
text and a link to a particular page at the
organization’s Web site. If you want to make a home
page without using a lick of HTML, this stack could be
exactly the tool you need.
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http : / /edweb . sdsu . edu/edweb_f older/People/EDTEC_Students . html
518 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
HoTMetaL and HoTMetaL Pro
SoftQuad’s $195 HoTMetaL Pro has the usual round
of expected features, as well as support for tables,
forms, macros, spell checking, and error checking. But
you’ll find it too hot to handle If you don't have six to
eight megabytes of RAM for the program and another
few megabytes of RAM kicking around so you can
launch a Web browser at the same time. A number of
early adapters of HoTMetaL Pro have expressed
frustration at the quirky and un-Mac-like interface.
Depending on what other programs do and how quickly
SoftQuad Improves Its rough edges, HoTMetaL Pro
could bum out by 1996 or become a major player.
SoftQuad also has a freeware version of HoTMetaL
Pro — called HoTMetaL, which Is available for Windows
and the Sun OS. There may be a freeware Mac
version available by the time you read this book.
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HTML Editor
HTML Editor, $25 shareware program from Rick Giles,
has a few features for creating a set of related Web
pages or creating forms, and It opens files as large as
200K. HTML Editor offers keyboard shortcuts for
applying some tags, and a floating window for user-
defined tags. It has helpful dialog boxes for setting up
links to other URLs and to graphics; it lets you preview
your work in a Web browser; and Its Replace function
supports GREP, (a sophisticated way to use a Replace
command). HTML Editor’s local, online documentation
is minimal, but Rick has posted some documentation
at HTML Editor’s Web site. Power Mac users will want
to hold off on HTML Editor until Rick switches to a
development system that generates PowerPC code;
right now HTML Editor runs fairly slowly on Power
Macs.
http : / /dragon . acadiau . ca/-giles/HTML_Editor/Documentation . html
HTML Pro
Niklas Frykholm’s $5 HTML Pro stands out as a
finalist In the contest for best shareware HTML editor.
It offers two windows, one for showing your file with
HTML tags, and another for showing what your HTML
tags will look like In a browser, making It extremely
easy to understand how inserting a tag changes the
look of your page. You can edit the text and add tags
In either window. HTML Pro converts special
characters to their HTML entitles on the fly, either as
you open a file or as you type the characters.
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Chapter 26 ♦ Creating Your Web Page 519
HTML Web Weaver
HTML Web Weaver began as HTML SuperText, and
its author, Robert Best, has rapidly expanded the
program. Currently, HTML Web Weaver works best for
existing short files (files must be under 32K) that need
HTML tags added. On the more complex side of HTML
coding, Web Weaver offers a Replace function and
help with inserting tags for forms, but lacks features
that help with creating and managing a group of
related Web pages. Web Weaver stands out for its
flexibility and helpful philosophical approach (including
extensive and useful balloon help). HTML Web
Weaver Is shareware, and It costs $25 for most
people; $14 for educational users.
http : / /WWW. pot sd am . edu /Web .Weaver/About . html
NaviPress
NaviSoft has a commercial Web authoring program up
its sleeve that should be available in mid-to-late 1995.
The program, called NaviPress, is being ported to the
Macintosh from its Windows version and will work best
with NaviServer-equipped Web servers. NaviPress
offers sophisticated authoring and site^reation tools,
including WYSIWYG editing of local or online Web
pages and the capability to create forms without
knowing how forms work behind the scenes. NaviPress
also offers a web-like overview of documents at a site.
http: //v/ww.navisoft .com/tour/ tour, html
WebDoor Publisher
WebDoor Publisher comes from Open Door Networks,
an Internet provider in Oregon, that uses Apple Remote
Access (ARA) connections (you can read more about
ARA connections In chapter 18, “PPP’'). I have a
feeling other providers will copy the WebDoor Publisher
idea soon, because it provides a customized
HyperCard stack that enables you to make a simple
home page even If you don't know any HTML at all. If
you have a WebDoor account from Open Door
Networks, you can then put your page on the Web
simply by clicking the Publish button. WebDoor
Publisher is not particularly flexible, but you can use a
different program to further edit the text It creates.
WebDoor Publisher is free to people who have
WebDoor accounts; $25 shareware to everyone else.
http : / /WWW. opendoor. com/webdoor/webdoor. html
lfl«»Ooor r»bllth>r I.Cti |
Open Door Networks and WebDoor™
The east ea tear to gee on the Web
Now you can publish on the Web as
easily as you can connect to Open Door!
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Creating
3* Your Web
5
520 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Web Resources
The Internet is loaded with Web resources, and almost everything I know about the Web
came from reading Web pages and participating in mailing lists. If you want to go further
with the Web than just making a simple home page, I strongly recommend these re-
sources, which I have found to be up-to-date and helpful.
The first resource is a family of four mailing lists about the Macintosh and the Internet.
Two of the lists discuss Web-related topics:
■ Apple-Internet-Authors list: A great place to talk about authoring software,
authoring techniques, and other issues.
■ Apple-Internet-Providers: This is the list where you can ask about forms, CGI
scripts, Web server software, server hardware, and so on.
The home page for the lists explains how to sign up and acts as a jumping off point for
exploration of other Web-based resources:
http: / /abs . apple . com/ apple • internet/
If your Web interests concern more than the Macintosh, you might try the HTML
Authoring Mailing List, which discusses issues related to HTML coding and Web
serving, on most any platform you can imagine. If you ask a question, be sure to indicate
for what operating system you want the answer. To subscribe, send email to
listserv@netcentral.net, and put the following command in the body of your mes-
sage: SUBSCRIBE hlml-list your name. Put your real name in the message.
For help setting up MacHTTP as a Web server and for writing CGI scripts to run forms,
I cannot say nice enough things about Jon Wiederspan's online tutorial.
http : / /vAv\v. uwtc .Washington . edu/Computing/WWY/CreatingASite . html
HTML for Fun and Profit
Well, I hope that this chapter has given you the information you need to start authoring
your own Web pages. As much as the programs that hide the HTML from you are start-
ing to appear, I do recommend that you spend some time learning how HTML works. It's
a surprisingly flexible language, and when HTML 3.0 is finalized, it will become all the
more flexible. The programs that handle HTML behind the scenes will become even more
necessary then, but at the same time, if they make mistakes or don't include all the
tagging options that you want, you'll need to know how to correct the mistakes or modify
the codes manually.
This ends our journey into the world of HTML. The next chapter, "Utilities & Miscellany,"
covers a veritable menagerie of miscellaneous MacTCP programs.
Chapter
27
Utilities &
Miscellany
Okay, 1 admit it; I've run into a completely ambiguous group of software that
isn't really related in any way. You'll find discussions and capsule reviews in
this chapter about programs like NCSA Telnet, MacWAIS, Bolo, CU-SeeMe,
Maven, Archie, Finger, Talk, ircle, Homer, and a number of others. These
programs do a variety of things, but most are one-trick ponies, so I've decided
to lump them all together in this chapter. Within the chapter, I try to create
some sections for related programs. First, I look at Telnet programs and then
WAIS clients, both of which would have been full chapters in years before the
Web. Then I lapse into the looser categories, including Games, Information
Finders, Real-Time Communication, and Tools.
However, before I get to any of that, I want to look in some detail at a very
important program that doesn't fit into even any of these loose categories, the
public domain Internet Config.
Internet Config
The Internet has a problem. There are simply too many details for anyone who
doesn't spend all day using the Internet to remember. Pop quiz! What's your
SMTP server? What's your NNTP server? The URL for your home page?
522 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Sorry about that. I even promised early on that there wouldn't be any quizzes, but the
point I want to make is that there are many pieces of information that not all of us neces-
sarily remember, and there's nothing worse than trying to configure a new program and
not remembering the name of your SMTP server or something equally mundane. And
besides, it's a pain to type the same information into each program.
A new program from Peter Lewis and Quinn "The Eskimo!" has started to solve this
problem and will continue to cement the Macintosh's position as the preeminent Internet
client platform. Internet Config stores all your common Internet preferences in a single
place, simplifying the process of configuring MacTCP-based programs with information
such as your preferred email address, FTP helper application, and helper applications.
Before Internet Config, configuring all the programs with the same information was
almost as bad as going to multiple doctors to have health care committed on you, given
that each doctor asks for the same information on a different forms.
Internet Config provides a simple interface for setting these preferences and makes a
database of those preferences available to other applications. In other words, after you
enter your email address into Internet Config, both Anarchie and NewsWatcher can read
it from the Internet Config database, and do not force you to enter it again and again. This
capability is so useful that I've included Internet Config on the ISKM disk.
Internet Config manages the following groups of preferences:
■ Personal: such as your real name and your signature
■ Email: email address and other mail related details
■ News: news server and related details
■ File Transfer: download folder and preferred archive sites
■ Other Services: default hosts for other services, like Web and Gopher
■ Fonts: preferred font settings for lists, screen, and printer
■ File Types: for mapping extensions to Macintosh file types
■ Helpers: for mapping URLs to their helper applications
Internet programs must support Internet Config — there's no way for them to know about
the preferences database otherwise. Luckily, the Internet Config development mailing list
included most of the Macintosh Internet developers, and many of them have committed
to supporting Internet Config in future versions of their programs. Programs that support
Internet Config now include Peter Lewis's Register 1.1, NewsWatcher 2.0b24,
NewsHopper 1.1, and Anarchie 1.5 (the last two of wluch rely entirely on Internet
Config). Applications slated to support Internet Config in the future include InterCon's
TCP/ Connect II, Aladdin's Stuffit family, and NCSA Telnet.
Note
Chapter 17 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 523
Keep in mind that Internet Config is there to help you, not to make your life miserable. You
do not have to fill in every preference immediately, or even at all.
Installation & Setup
When you launch Internet Config for the first time, it asks if you would like to install its
Internet Config Extension. You should do so, and you don't even have to restart (it's not
that sort of extension — it's actually a shared library). If you accidentally click Cancel, you
can always choose Install Extension from Internet Config's Extension menu later on.
Basic Usage
After installing the Internet Config Extension, Internet Config brings up its main window,
the Internet Preferences window (see figure 27.1). It has large buttons for each of the eight
groups of preferences.
Internet Preferences ~
|D=-|
M
9
Personal
Emill
New*
File Transfer
S*
[>
rm
i
other Service*
Font*
File Mapping
Helpers
Figure 27.1 Internet Cojifig main window.
First, click the Personal button to bring up the Personal window (see figure 27.2).
Figure 27.2 Internet Config Personal window.
Part IV
524 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
In the Personal window, enter your real name, your organization (Peter and Quinn use
the Australian spelling, of course), the string you want to use for quoting replies, and
your signature and plan file. Your plan could be used by a Finger server, for instance,
should a future Finger server support Internet Config.
Close the Personal window, and click the second button. Email. Internet Config brings up
the Email window (see figure 27.3).
1 ■fi Email
Email Rddress:
Mall Recount:
Mall Password:
SMTP Host:
ace@tidblts.com
oce@klng.tldbits.com
king.tldbits.com
Moll Headers:
X-Trivla; Ther« om spades of penguins. Olad you asked?
Figure 27.3 Internet Config Email window.
Enter your email address in the field of the same name, and enter your POP account in the
Mail Account field. (Internet Config doesn't label the field POP Account because you
might use IMAP or another mail protocol.) Type your password in the Mail Password
field and note that Internet Config protects it from prying eyes. Your SMTP server's name
goes in the SMTP Host field. Finally, if you need to include any extra headers in email
sent via NewsWatcher, enter them in the Mail Headers field. Be very careful here since
you could screw up your email fairly seriously if you don't know what you're doing.
When you're done, close the Email window and click the News button to bring up the
News window (see figure 27.4).
Figure 27.4 Internet Config News window.
Just as in the Email window, enter your NNTP host name. Although many providers
don't require them at all, your news username and password are usually the same as your
Note
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 525
email userid and password. But this is not always the case — you can see that mine are
different because I read news on my provider's Unix machine, but run my own mail
server on a Mac. Again, if you want to add some headers to your news postings, enter
them in the News Headers field. Don't mess with the headers too much unless you know
what you're doing — I'm not entirely sure how well various news programs handle
random headers. Close the News window.
Next up is the File Transfer window, which you get to by clicking the File Transfer button
(see figure 27.5).
ggr • File Transfer fe
Rrchie Semen | UK
Info-Mac Semen | flOl ^
UMIch Semen | USfl, orst
Doionload Folden [ Doionloads ]
Figure 27.5 Internet Config File Transfer window.
The settings in the File Transfer window are used by programs like Anarchie to transfer
files. As with the Mail Account setting, Internet Config doesn't assume much, so any
program that transfers files could use the settings in the File Transfer window, whether or
not it specifically used FTP.
The Archie server pop-up menu lists all the known Archie servers when Peter and Quinn
shipped Internet Config. Pick the one you want Anarchie to use as the default — 1 have the
best luck with the one in the United Kingdom for some reason.
The next two pop-up menus, for the Info-Mac Server and the UMich Server, refer to the
major Macintosh mirror networks of FTP sites. There are numerous possible mirrors that
you can choose from, and again, these are the mirrors that Anarchie uses by default.
If you copy the pathname of a file from an Info-Mac Digest, it starts with /info-mac/.
Anarchie recognizes that string, and xuhen you paste the path into Anarchie's Get via FTP
window, Anarchie uses your Info-Mac mirror default setting to fill in the name of the host to
use xvith that path. It's extremely handy.
You can pick whichever Info-Mac and UMich mirror sites that you prefer, or you can
enter new ones. I currently like the mirror that America Online provides for the Internet
because I can always get in to snag a file.
Finally in this window, click the Download Folder button. Internet Config brings up a
Standard File Dialog where you choose a folder for your downloads to end up in by
Part IV
526 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
default. I personally dump everything in a folder called ''Downloads" that lives on my
desktop. Close the File Transfer window.
Next, click the Other Services button to bring up the Other Services window (see figure
27.6).
Other Serulces
Ph Host:
Finger Host:
UJhois Host:
Telnet Host:
FTP Host:
Gopher Host:
tlJlHUJ Home Poge:
IHRIS Gateiooy:
LOflP Seruer:
LDHP Searchbase:
qi.cornell.edu |
halcyon.com |
rs.lnternlc.net |
coho.halcyon.com |
ftp.tidblts.com |
king.tidbits.com |
http://king.tldbits.com/ |
1
1
1
Figure 27.6 Internet Config Other Services window.
In this window, you have lots of fields for lots of different server names and gateways
and home pages and all that. My advice? Don't worry about anything you don't under-
stand. For instance, I haven't a clue what LDAP Server I could use or what LDAP
Searchbase I could put into that field, so I just left them blank. No harm done, and noth-
ing in this window is necessary. In the future, some programs may rely on information
that you would enter here, but for the moment, just fill in what you know.
When you're done, close the Other Services window, and click the Fonts button to bring
up the Fonts window (see figure 27.7).
Figure 27.7 Internet Config Fonts window.
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 527
In the Fonts window, Internet Config provides three possible default font settings.
Anarchie does use them, so if you use Anarchie, you may want to set the default list font
to something relatively small so you can fit a lot of files into its windows. Or, if your eyes
don't like small text, increase all three settings. In theory, the List Font is used for lists,
such as Anarchie's windows or NewsWatcher's article listings. The Screen Font is used for
displaying large chunks of non-proportional text, such as in a NewsHopper article, and
the Printer Font is used for printing that same text.
Close the Fonts window, and you're done! There are two more buttons. File Mappings
and Helpers, but frankly, you don't have to mess with them if you don't want to. In
pursuit of completeness, let's look at them anyway. Click on File Mappings so that
Internet Config brings up the large scrolling window of file mappings (see figure 27.8).
Next, double-click on one of the mappings, such as the Acrobat entry.
File Moppinqs
D
RUI to QT Utility - nui Mouie
.QVi
fliiobat - Pot lotilo DKpIciy Format
pdf
Rnorchie - URL Bookmork
■url
[ Rdd
Add Mapping Entry i
c
Name:
EHtension:
MIME Type:
Pnit<il)lt> Displiiy Foimdl
|-pd>
oppllcation/pdf
(i) Plain Tent
O Binory Boto
O Mocintosh
File Type: TEHT
File Creator coro
□ Post Process:
□ Not for Incoming
n Not for Outgoing
[ Choose EHomple... ]
Acrobat
C
<none>
[ Concel ] |[ OK
Figure 27.8 Internet Config File Mappings window.
File mappings are one of Internet Config's most useful features because it's a pain for
every program to provide an interface to them. Basically, programs can use the file
mappings to look at a file's extension, . pdf in the screen shot, and know that the file is a
PDF file and belongs to Adobe Acrobat. File mappings are a manual method of doing for
files from the Internet what the Macintosh does behind the scenes with file types in the
desktop database. You can add file mappings if you like, although most of the common
ones are already entered. More commonly, you may want to change some of them to use
your favorite text editor instead of BBEdit or SimpleText, for instance.
Part IV
528 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Enough of the File Mappings, since you really don't have to mess with them. Close the
File Mappings window and click the Helpers button to open Internet Config's last win-
dow (see figure 27.9). Internet Config has defined a number of types of tasks that you may
want to use a helper application with, and it has set up some default entries. The main
one you're likely to change is the editor entry because everyone has a favorite editor.
Figure 27.9 Internet Config Helpers windoio.
I have mine set to Nisus Writer — changing it is merely a matter of clicking the Choose
Helper button and finding the program on your hard disk.
The utility of the Helpers preferences is that it provides a single place for you to say that
whenever any Internet Config-aware program tries to do something via FTP, it can pass
off the task to Anarchie. Or, more commonly, whenever there's a file to be edited, it can
pass off the task to your editor of choice. You can add new tasks as well, although there's
no point unless some new application comes out and needs a different type of helper
that's not currently defined.
Well, that's about it. Close the Helpers window and quit Internet Config, saving any
changes you might have made. You're unlikely to use Internet Config often — that's the
point of it.
Evaluation & Details
Internet Config is a simple application, but it is well-written and easy to use. It has
excellent balloon help and decent documentation. Other than the fussy details of creating
new file mappings, I can't see most people having any trouble with Internet Config.
Although Internet Config has broad-based support already, support from additional
programs is critical to its success. I strongly encourage all Internet programmers to
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 529
support Internet Config. It's a relatively minor programming task. John Norstad (author
of NewsWatcher and Disinfectant among others) said, "I figured this [Internet Config]
would be reasonably easy to support, and it turned out to be even easier. There were no
major problems or stumbling blocks — ^just a bunch of really easy code, and it worked with
no major hassles." I'd especially like to see Eudora support Internet Config, since it's one
of the most common Internet programs available and would send a powerful message to
other Internet developers.
Peter and Quinn have placed Internet Config and its source code in the public domain,
and they encourage others to build on it to provide additional functionality. Internet
Config can play a huge role in making the Mac an even better Internet platform because it
can make coherent the often confusing process of configuring many different programs.
The official support address for Internet Config is internet - conf ig@share . com. If you
find a bug in Internet Config, forward details to that address. To discuss Internet Config
in general, the comp . sys . mac . comm newsgroup is the best place to do so, because it
allows programmers to stay in touch with the discussions without being overwhelmed
with email. Once again, kudos to Peter and Quinn for a job well done. You can retrieve
the latest version of Internet Config, currently at 1.1, from all the main Internet FTP sites
and from the URL below.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Telnet
I must confess up front to a certain bias against the next few programs that I talk about.
This is not so much because they're bad programs — on the contrary, they're quite good —
but because they provide access to standard shell accounts and ugly command-line
interfaces, and I have a MacTCP-based connection and lots of great graphical software.
Oh well, as Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, has said, "Scien-
tific progress goes 'boink.'"
That's right. I'm talking about NCSA Telnet, Comet, TN3270, and the various Telnet tools,
all of which let you travel back in time to the days when you couldn't do the sorts of
things that I've talked about so far in this chapter.
NCSA Telnet
NCSA's best-known application is also their most recent — NCSA Mosaic — but NCSA
Telnet comes from the same organization and is equally as much an essential part of your
MacTCP toolkit. The latest version of NCSA Telnet is 2.6, although there's a 2.7b2 in
testing right now.
Part IV
530 biternet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Basic Usage
There isn't any configuration necessary for you to start using NCSA Telnet, but just like
the Unix Telnet, there's not much to do with it unless you know where you're going.
Telnet doesn't do anything on its own; it's merely a conduit to another program running
on a remote machine.
After you launch NCSA Telnet, go to the File menu and choose Open Connection. NCSA
Telnet opens a dialog box in which you enter the host to which you want to connect (if
you must enter a port number, enter it here with a space separating it from the host
name). There's also a pop-down menu for selecting a predefined host (see figure 27.10).
«°*^^^5esslon lhalcyon.com | B
lilindoui Name jlhis i$ your mindoujl |
□ FTP session m)
□ Hu (hen tickle <»fli
□ incrypl iXE)
[ Cancel ]
Figure 27.10 NCSA Telnet Open Connection dialog.
Don't worry about the FTP Session checkbox and the Authenticate and Encrypt options.
They are only valid if you get additional software. If you don't want to provide a window
name, that's no big deal, either. Click OK and NCSA Telnet opens a terminal window
that enables you to log in to the machine you specified, in my case, my account on
halcyon.com (see figure 27.11).
\ This Is your mindomi i
>>> Recounts that hovt not boon used vithin th« lost 30 doys and <<<
>>> or« bthind in payr.«nts art subjoct to rssoual slthout notic*. <<<
Typ« *h«lp' for g«n«ral infortiotlon including our currant toms
and conditions linfomotlon locatod undir occ«ptabls-us« pollciss)
( hoo Jun 13 1 (Xjr onlina tost of th« antargency pouor tystMB v«nt
quit* smoothly. Both th« ganorotor and tha UPS systass
functionod as axpactad.
C hon Jun 13 1 Tha Usb Sorvor mas tokon do«n for a conf igurotion change
lots gestardoy. and •• nagloctad to r«-«nabl« It. It Is no«
bock in soruic* Rpologiss for the inconuonlsnca
C Thu Mar 1? I Effsetiu* 31 March, 1W4, IRC sill not b« supported or
alloMd on ony of our systons. IRC uia SLIP vl 1 1 be pomlttsd.
( Thu Jun Q I H«sd halp, o question anseered, an account chonged from
shell to SLIP? For this and nore, send mall to supportBhalcyon.com
<Vou eoy type ’’eelcone* to see this nessoge again)
Keyboard Idle tiee Is now set to 60 ainutes. This does not affect
any session I iai ts.
thalcyon]: /b/tidbl ts> ls|
M
2L
Figure 27.11 NCSA Telnet Terminal wmdoiv.
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 531
Once you get to this point, you must play by the rules of the remote machine, which in
this case involves using the basic Unix shell account. You could also have connected to an
Archie server, to a MUD, to a library catalog, or any other resource that's available via
Telnet.
Although NCSA Telnet certainly has plenty of other commands in its menus, on the
whole, you shouldn't have to mess with them regularly. A number of them control how
NCSA Telnet reacts to certain types of host machines; with others you can query the
network; and various options enable you to determine how your terminal windows look
and act. But at the base level, NCSA Telnet enables you, from your Mac, to access services
that are limited to the command line.
I like the shortcut for accessing commonly used sites from the Open Connection dialog
(you define those sites in the Session submenu from the Preferences menu in the Edit
menu). Version 2.6 of NCSA Telnet added a hierarchical Open Special menu to the File
menu — it provides even quicker access to the shortcuts that you've defined. What I'd
really like, though, is to have NCSA Telnet remember the last 10 or so sites I've visited
and provide instant access to them as well.
Special Features
I may have sounded terse in the preceding section, but NCSA Telnet does provide some
extra neat features. I'm impressed by the capability to open multiple sessions to different
sites or even to the same site. Switching between sites is as simple as clicking on another
window.
If you regularly use one or more Telnet sessions, you can save Set documents that record
the open sessions. Opening that document later automatically connects you to all of those
sites.
One feature that I often find myself using is the Delete /Backspace toggle under the
Session menu. Some sites interpret the Mac's Delete key differently, so if pressing the
Delete key doesn't delete a character, try switching to Backspace (or vice versa, if the
Backspace key is the problem) from the Session menu.
If you are running NCSA Telnet and you go to the File menu and select FTP Enable,
NCSA Telnet turns your Mac into a simple FTP server. Be careful of this capability
because it constitutes a possible security risk. Check your settings in the Preferences
submenus carefully.
Finally, in a feature that exists only in the forthcoming Telnet 2.7, if you use Internet
Config, you can Command-click on any URLs you may see in the course of your Telnet
session, and NCSA Telnet passes the URL to the appropriate helper application.
Part IV
532 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Evaluation & Details
Although rd like to pretend that you can avoid Telnet in general, that's not true, and thus
NCSA Telnet is an essential part of your MacTCP software collection. For instance, there
are some services which provide excellent information that you must access via Telnet.
In addition, there are times when it's handy to be able to go in and use Unix. As long as
the PPP and SLIP accounts generally available are based on Unix, there wall alw^ays be
some reasons why you might want to log in via Telnet and use Unix. Perhaps you need to
unlock a POP mailbox or want to move a file from one Unix host to another without
bringing it to the Mac in between. Those tasks and various others require access to the
Unix command-line, and Telnet provides that access.
NCSA Telnet is a public domain program, which means you can use it for free in any
manner you want. You can retrieve NCSA Telnet from either of the following:
ftp: //ftp. tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp : / /f tp. ncsa . uiuc . edu /Mac /Telnet/
Comet
Although not in as widespread use as NCSA Telnet,
Cornell’s Comet has many of the same features as
NCSA Telnet, with a few added In. Comet offers a
number of additional emulation modes, most notably
3270 (full screen IBM mode), and it provides access
to various special keys via buttons on the screen.
This Is especially handy with 3270 sessions, since
they require special keyboard mapping. If you click
on the zoom box, rather than zooming the window,
Comet minimizes it into an icon on your desktop,
much the way Microsoft Windows applications
behave. Although less useful for people using PPP
or SLIP accounts, for people who must be logged In
to a terminal session all day long, this is a great
feature for getting Comet out of the way while
keeping It easily accessible. Comet 3.1.1 is free from
Cornell University.
Comell llbrailet
f tp: / /ftp . cit . Cornell . edu/pub/mac/comm/CometExternal/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 533
TN3270
NCSA Telnet cannot handle all the mainframe sites
that you may want to explore. Some IBM mainframes
use 3270 terminals, and v/ithout delving into the ugly
details, let me say that if you want to telnet to one of
these machines, you must use either Cornell’s Comet
or Brown University’s free TN3270, which looks as
though It were based on NCSA Telnet. TN3270 is
similar to NCSA Telnet, but unfortunately, it doesn’t
appear that you can have multiple windows open with
TN3270. You need both the main file for version
2.3d26 and the updated files from 2.4a4 for a
complete package.
ln3270 for the Macintosh
by Peter DiCamlllo
with NCSA TCP/IP Kernel for the Macintosh by Tim
Krauskopf and Balge B. Paulsen, and with tn3270
protocol by Greg Mlnshall.
by Ccmpvitlng Informttlon S*rvlc*5 Brown Universlbj .
CopjrigM ® 19S8-I993 by Brown University «nd by Peter DiCamilb
NCSA Kernel Cop^jrt-jht ® 1997-1988 by the Be«rd of Trustees of the
University of Illinois, 1n3270 Copyright ® 1934-1989 by the Reyents
of the University of CellfcrnU, end by Gr^ 3 ory Olenn f
•tlnshell.
2.4a4 MacTCP version April 28, 1993
(i !l
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/tn3270-23d26.hqx
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/tn3270-24a4.hqx
Telnet CTB Tools
Several Communications Toolbox (CTB) tools for
Telnet also exist. These tools should work with any
CTB*aware communications application, such as the
free Termy, MicroPhone II, SITcomm, or Communi-
cate. I know of four main Telnet tools at the moment.
MicroPhone Pro ships with one called the MP Telnet
Tool; VersaTerm includes the VersaTerm Telnet Tool;
Tim Endres has written a free one called TGE TCP
Tool, and there’s a demo of the TCPack Tool that AOL
and eWorld use. There’s not much to differentiate
these tools because all they do is allow a CTB-aware
terminal emulator to pretend to be a Telnet applica-
tion. All provide methods of listing commonly
accessed hosts — the most important user feature. 1
have had trouble with all of them, which may be the
fault of the various applications I was using, but I’ve
had the best luck with the VersaTerm Telnet Tool. You
can get the TGE TCP Tool, along with a demo of the
TCPack Tool in:
ftp: //ftp. tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/ctb/
WAIS
Thinking Machines' WAIS has spawned a number of client applications for the
Macintosh. However, with the rise of the World Wide Web as a front end to WAIS
Utilities &
Miscellany
534 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
databases, the importance of the WAIS clients has significantly decreased. And in fact,
none of the WAIS client programs have been updated since the second edition of this
book came out in August of 1994. This tells me that there's simply not much interest in
stand-alone WAIS clients, so I've reduced the discussion to a capsule review of the client
that is still worthwhile, Mac WAIS.
In addition to the old and ignored WAIS for Macintosh, I've run across three other
specialized WAIS clients that run on the Macintosh — HyperWAIS, JFIFBrowser, and
WAIS Picture Browser. However, none of these seem to have been used seriously, and
they certainly haven't been updated in years. I don't recommend you bother even looking
for them.
If you don't want to mess with a WAIS client at all, simply point your favorite Web
browser at this URL:
http: //wwv/.wais.com/newhomepages/surf .html
Games
Many people enjoy using the Internet for relatively mundane things, but that's not to
imply that there aren't plenty of downright fun things to do. Among them are the various
games you can play, and although it's beyond the scope of this book to go into all the
possibilities, I do want to mention the best of the MacTCP-based game client programs.
There are a few, like a client for the Interactive Chess Server at ics . onenet . net : 5000
that simply don't work any more — to play chess you must resort to other methods. For
chess, you might check out this Web page:
http : / /wwv/. delorie . com/game - room/chess/
As usual, unless I provide an alternative URL, assume that you can find all of these
programs in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 535
MacWAIS
MacWAIS provides a decent interface to WAIS
sources, and it gives you easy ways to choose which
sources to search, what terms you wish to search for,
and ways of handling relevance feedback. Simply
double-clicking on a document that MacWAIS returns
displays it, and if it's large, MacWAIS has a Find
command to help out. MacWAIS Is a good, simple
program that does its job well, but it could use some
cleaning up, such as the capability to resize Its main
window. MacWAIS is $35 shareware from the El Net
group of the Microelectronics and Computer
Technology Corporation.
I •Unnomed Ouettlon I
ftp://ftp.einet.net/einet/mac/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Bolo
Stuart Cheshire’s $25 (or £15 if you’re in the U.K.)
shareware Bolo is an addictive multi-player tank
game that supports robot opponents as well.
Although it’s not arcade-level action, Bolo Is
graphical. Strategy Is all-important, and Bolo makes
all sorts of alliances and rivalries possible. Numerous
“brains" (specially programmed robot tanks) have
been created to spice up the action. Along with the
brains, people have written numerous utilities for
Bolo, Including terrain map generators and utilities
for finding Bolo games in progress on the Internet.
There’s even a rec. games. bolo newsgroup, and
the FAQ for that group is a good place to start
learning about the basic rules of Bolo etiquette. Bolo
prefers a fast connection (a 28.8 Kbps modem might
work) and doesn’t work well over 14.4 kbps PPP
connections that I’ve tried. The program does work
over AppleTalk networks, if you want to play with
friends locally. If you enjoy strategy tank games,
definitely check out Bolo.
ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/game/bolo/
Part IV
536 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MacFIBS
Paul Ferguson’s free MacFIBS is a dedicated
backgammon client for FIBS, which stands for the
First Internet Backgammon Server. RBS has several
thousand players registered, ranging widely in skill
levels. Rather than just provide a slightly enhanced
Telnet client, MacRBS gives you a completely
graphical interface to the Internet backgammon
game, to the point where you make your moves by
dragging little colored checkers around on the board.
MacRBS seems well-done and has rather thorough
documentation.
MacMud
Mimir Reynisson’s free MacMud is a Macintosh
implementation of a MUD (which, as you may
remember, stands for Multi-User Dungeon or Multi-
User Dimension). From what I can see, MacMud is a
definite instance of “If you have to ask, you won't
understand It." I didn't understand it, even after
reading the minimal documentation, but I gather that
if you want to run your own MUD on a Macintosh
permanently connected to the Internet, you can use
MacMud, which is a port of the Unix LPMud program.
One of the pieces of documentation is a description
of MacMud’s scripting language, but It too is fairly
minimal.
Vritlen by ;
Mimir Rfynisson
Errwn-Jiddress :
sk«1m1r(^uvap5y psy uva nl
MaoMud Is darivad from tha unix gama LPMud.
LPmud is ® CopyrigM by Lars Pans j1, 1990-1993. AH Rights Rasarvad.
MacMud is ® Copyright by Mimir Raynisson 1992-93. AH Rights Rasarvad.
This application may not ba usad in any way whatsoavar for monatary gain.
MacMUSH
Continuing on in the clients for MUD variants, we
come to MacMUSH, a free program from Jens
Johannsen. No, I can’t tell you offhand what the
differences are between MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, or
MUCKs, other than that they use different server
programs. MacMUSH's special features include a
simple macro facility for typing repetitive words or
phrases (a common need, unfortunately), a simple
line editor for creating text before sending it, and the
capability to mark certain words, which might make it
easy to see when certain people say things or when
certain objects are used. Check out the MacMUSH
home page below for a bunch of other MUD-related
links.
http: // imv.aau.dk/-jenswj /macmush.html
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 537
MUDDweller
The free MUDDweller 1.2, from 0. Maquelin, is yet
another dedicated MUD client program. MUDDweller
enables you to connect either via the Communica-
tions Toolbox or via MacTCP. It has a few features
that make it more useful than Telnet, such as being
line-oriented (so you have an edit line to compose on
before sending your command), a command history
that you can use to avoid retyping commands, a
logging capability, multiple sessions, and a simple file
transfer tool.
1 1 1 1
n a
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Cm
i i ji
1 1 1 1 1 1
i- i vw 0
MUDDujelier 1.2, o Mac MUD client
by 0. Moquelin
This program is free. Feel free to
i ^ ii
giue it aujayi
ftp://rudolf.eth2.ch/pub/mud/muddweller-12.hqx
NetRPG
For those people who used to play role-playing
games like TSR’s lawyer-laden Dungeons® &
Dragons^*^’ but whose games disappeared with the
departure of friends for college, check out Erich
Bratton’s $10 shareware NetRPG for a renewed fix.
Based on the Chat server originally written by Peter
Lewis and updated by Nathan Neulinger, NetRPG is
essentially a server for easily running D&D-type
games. Players connect via Telnet or through a more
suitable program like MUDDweller, and the entire
game takes place in text. Sounds like a lot of work to
me, but then again, so are real-life role-playing
games.
NetRPG © 1995 by Erich G Bratton
Parts by Nathan Neulinger and Peter N Levis
Parts © by Symantec Corp (Think Pascal 4)
^ ^ '^1
This program is share vare.
Please collect a fev dollars from each of
the people you play vith over the net, and
register using the included Register program.
erich@kagi.com
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Information Finders
Next, we come to a loose category of programs that are dedicated to helping you find
some specific piece of information, be it a file via Archie, the current time, the latest
weather forecast, your mother, or perhaps merely the answer to the question of whether
or not a friend is currently connected. Unless mentioned otherwise, these programs
live in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Part IV
Note
538 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Finger
People with MacTCP-based access can use an elegant program from Peter Lewis, called
Finger, which is an implementation of the Unix Finger program. It enables you to finger
other people to see if they are logged on, or to read information they have put in their
Plan files. I find Finger useful for accessing certain types of information over the Internet,
checking to see what someone's userid on my local machine might be, and checking
domain name information via Finger's support for Whois.
Basic Usage
After launching Finger, simply select Finger from the File menu (see figure 27.12).
Mngc?r
User
lyonoff 1
Machine
1 csd4.csd.uuim.edu |
□ UJhois Seruer 8SS
[ Concel )
[ Soue ] [Set Defoult] |[ Finger ]|
' "Jjy Finger ^
User
jcompuSerue |
Mochlne
|r$.intemic.net |
^ UJhois Seruer 88S
[ Concel ]
[ Saue ] [Set Oefoult] [[ Ulhois ]]
Figure 27.12 Finger dialogs.
Type the username you want to finger in the User text entry box, and below that type the
machine name in the Machine entry box.
You can simply type the entire address in either one of the boxes, and it works just fine,
If you want to access a Whois server (a different Unix program that looks up information
about machines), check that box, enter the name of the machine you want to learn about
in the User field, and enter rs . internic . net in the Machine field. Then click the Whois
button to have Finger go out and execute your request. That's what I've done in the
second window in figure 27.12.
Finger saves requests in a hierarchical Finger menu, and you can select an item such as
yanof f @csd4 . csd . uwm . edu to finger that address immediately (see figure 27.13).
Chapter 27 ^ Utilities & Miscellany 539
copl®oddJob.uchicagQ.edu
CInsD S6UI forecost®typhoon.atmos. colostote.edu
Page Setup... quoke®geophys. Washington. edu
Print... j€p | yonoff(S>csd4.csd.uujm.edu
Remoue ^
Sdue Finger Menu
Preferences...
Help...
Quit
Figure 27.13 Finger hierarchical menu.
Now, assuming that the remote machine is up and running, you should see the results of
the Finger search appear onscreen. You can print the results window or copy information
from it, if you so choose. After you finger someone, you can save that entry in your Finger
Preferences file by selecting Save Finger Menu from the File menu. That's how I created
the list you see in figure 27.13, and it makes it easy to finger the same person or service at
a later time.
Finger has only two options. If you choose Preferences from the File menu, you can
decide whether you want to see the IP number (which is the number corresponding to the
machine name) in the title bar of the Finger results window; or decide whether you want
the Finger window to open on startup. (Using the Set Default button in the Finger win-
dow, you can choose which service or person should appear by default.) A third checkbox
in the Preferences window lets you set whether or not you've paid your $10 shareware
Evaluation & Details
I like Finger a lot. It's small, sweet, and to the point. As long as people continue to store
useful bits of information in Plan files. Finger will remain an essential part of your
MacTCP software kit. I haven't run into any problems with Finger, other than some sites
not responding, but that's not Finger's fault. Sometimes a machine may be down, or the
person updating the information may have gone on vacation. Finger is $10 shareware,
payable in either U.S. or Australian dollars, and you find the latest version in:
fee.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Part IV
540 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Daemon
Peter Lewis’s free Daemori program Is a generalized
server program that can provide services to the
appropriate clients. Hmm, that doesn’t make a lot of
sense, does It? Basically, if you want to provide a
Finger server, a Whois server (a variant of Finger
that Is generally less personal), an Ident server (fairly
useless on a single-user Macintosh), and both a
Daytime and an NTP (Network Time Protocol)
server, Daemon is the program for you. Of course,
any program like Daemon that is designed to provide
information about you to others on the Internet all the
time, is of dubious use if you have a SLIP or PPP
account that isn’t active all day long. Daemon is a
background-only application, so there’s no interface —
you configure what it does through a Plan file.
Daemon
HyperFinger Pro
HyperFinger Pro is a HyperCard stack that provides
a simple interface for regularly fingering the same
addresses. You can click the Rnger button to finger
an arbitrary address, but if you want to finger the
same address later on (and you’re using a real
version of HyperCard instead of HyperCard Player),
you can modify the script for one of the eight specific
buttons. That’s about all there is to HyperFinger,
although the Copy button places the contents of the
scrolling window into the clipboard for pasting Into
another program. HyperRnger Pro was written by
Frank Tito, and I suspect it’s free, since he says in the
background script’s comments that he modified
someone else’s original stack.
Hytelnet
Hytelnet isn’t a communications application at all.
Instead, it’s a HyperCard-based database of Telnet
sites. The HyperCard front end uses a large set of
cryptically named text files to present a menu
interface to a large number of primarily character-
based Internet resources. Hytelnet does offer
descriptions of the specific sites when you finally
work your way through the menus, and the program
makes it easy to launch NCSA Telnet, TN3270, or
TurboGopher to connect to the site in question.
Hytelnet 6.7 was written by Peter Scott; Charles
Burchlll created the HyperCard front end, which
requires HyperCard 2.1 or later.
ftp://ftp.usask.ca/pub/hytelnet/mac/
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 541
Mac Ph
The Ph protocol (which was created in part by Steve
Dorner of Eudora fame) is in relatively wide use,
especially at universities around the world, as an
electronic campus directory system. It’s excellent for
looking up someone’s email address or phone
number, but you do have to know what university
they attend or work for. The prolific John Norstad has
created a free Macintosh client for the Ph protocol
called Mac Ph. Of course, you can use Eudora to
look up information via Ph. but John’s stand-alone
client is easier to use. If you choose the Northwest-
ern Ph server, as I did. and then make sure your site
list Is updated (Update Site List in the Rle menu).
Mac Ph brings in a huge list of sites running Ph. I
could even find my Mom.
MacWeather
I’m extremely fond of Christopher Kidwell’s $10
shareware MacWeather. You tell MacWeather what
city you want to see the weather for, and it retrieves
the current data for you, displaying it in either digital
or analog form. MacWeather has preferences for
each of the weather items it reports on, so you can
have the temperature display in Fahrenheit or
Celsius, the barometer display in inches of Hg,
millimeters of Hg. or millibars, and the wind speed
display in miles per hour, knots, or meters per
second. You can also get the forecast, climatic data,
or marine forecasts in a separate window. If you’re
constantly connected to the Internet from a room with
no windows to the outside world, you can have
MacWeather update automatically. I’d like to see a
few minor enhancements, such as the capability to
have more than one city onscreen at the same time.
and an easier way to switch between cities. But these
are quibbles, and MacWeather Is neat— highly
recommended.
maX.500
The maX.500 program Is a specialized client
program for searching the X.500 Online Directory,
which can be thought of as a world-wide distributed
electronic telephone book. X.500 stores information
about people, organizations, groups of people,
documents, and services, and maX.500 provides an
interface for searching that Information. Unfortu-
nately, as promising as X.500 sounds, there doesn’t
seem to be all that much Information actually
available in it, which makes it somewhat a hit or miss
in terms of finding anyone. Still, it might be worth a
look If you’re really trying to find someone on the
Internet.
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Utilities &
Miscellany
542 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Network Time
I’m no longer as retentive about time as I used to be,
but it’s still nice to know whether your VCR is
accurate when taping TV shows. That’s why I like
Network Time, a $5 shareware control panel from
Pete Resnick. Network Time synchronizes your Mac’s
clock with a network time server, which is a program
running on an Internet machine that talks to other
time servers. A number of hops on down, one of the
machines gets Its time from an atomic clock. To
manually set your clock, open the Network Time
control panel, enter the IP name of your network time
server (ask your Internet provider, or guess at one of
the machines run by your provider), and click the Set
Time button. For automatic updating, drop Network
Time in your Control Panels folder, making sure to set
it to “Wait for MacTCP" if you use PPP or SLIP.
Network Time has some elegant touches, such as a
note about the last time It set your clock, and
excellent balloon help. Network Time Is definitely the
way to go for people wanting to synchronize clocks.
Netmork Time
Network Time
2.0.1 (US), © R«ntek. 1990-1993.
Tu», Jun 14, 1994 12:35:44 AM
Tim» s*rYtr
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Vh#n an ♦rror occurs :
0 Post notification 0 Ratry in |l3 | minf
Tha tima was last sat :
Mon, Jun 13, 1994
II ;38 :S4 PM
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/network-time.hqx
Real-Time Communication
One of the best features of the Internet is that you can communicate with other people
in distant lands without worrying about time zone problems or language problems be-
yond a basic grasp of written English. However, the Internet doesn't prevent real-time
conversations — they're simply a bit less common. As popular as IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
may be, it doesn't hold a candle to the amount of email or Usenet news generated on the
Internet. In addition, many people generally find IRC to be a waste of time. Although
there's no inherent reason for it to be one, the conversations due tend toward the sopho-
moric. For some logs of famous IRC times (such as during the 1994 California earthquake,
the Gulf War, the 1992 Russian Revolution, along with the IRC FAQ (Frequently Asked
Question) list, check out this Web page:
http : / /sunsite . unc . edu/dbarberi/chats . html
Typing to strangers may not be your cup of tea, though, and more recent programs
have brought sound and video to real-time Internet communications, most notably via
NetPhone and CU-SeeMe. These programs prefer fast connections and usually require
some additional hardware, such as a microphone or a video camera.
Once again, unless I mention otherwise, these programs are all available in;
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 543
Talk
Talk, yet another useful little program from Peter Lewis, implements the Unix talk
protocol on the Mac, providing a decent Macintosh interface in the process. Tve taken to
using Talk all the time, not to chat with strangers on the Internet, but so Tonya and I can
communicate small bits of information that aren't really worth a full interruption. It's also
great for telling someone something while they're talking on the phone.
Basic Usage
After you launch it, choose Talk from the File menu. Talk presents you with a small
dialog box that looks almost exactly like Finger's dialog box. You can type a username
and a machine name in the two fields provided. When you click the Talk button. Talk
adds that person to your Status window, which lists all of your current connections and
his status (see figure 27.14).
HEfL”
. ii^il Status \ ...
C
Hong Up ] [RingHgoinj
[ To Front ]|
1 37 AM tidbits^lvili i|nii com
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ox
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O
1 1
a
Figure 27.14 Talk Status window.
At this point. Talk notifies your friend to alert him to your talk request. After your party
makes the connection. Talk opens a two-paned window for you to type in and be typed at
(see figure 27.15).
You type in the bottom pane and your friend types in the top pane. (Since I had to fake
figure 27.15 because Tonya was out when I was writing this. I'm actually talking to myself
on my Unix shell account.)
Like Finger, Talk enables you to save a hierarchical menu of the people you commonly
talk to, and the interface is uncluttered and simple. My main complaint is that Talk could
use a more obvious interface for telling you what it's doing when you're attempting to
connect with someone. Tonya and I often end up trying too many times because we can't
tell that it's actually taking the other person an extra few seconds to switch into Talk and
answer the call.
Part IV
544 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Mou) 1 con talk to myself, using Pater's Talk program.
1 guess that makes me Thing 1?
p
10
And doum here 1 can also talk to myself. I'll be Thing 2.
o
Vou got 1 t .
a
Figure 27.15 Talk window.
Evaluation & Details
If you have a use for Talk, it's worthwhile. Talk comes with a background application
called Talkd, which simply receives requests to talk from others. Talk is $5 shareware
from Peter Lewis, and you can retrieve the latest version of Talk from:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Chat
Whereas Talk enables you to talk directly with
another person, and Homer (discussed later) enables
you to talk with multiple people on Internet Relay
Chat, Chat 2.0.3 acts as a Chat Server, much like
IRC itself. It's limited in comparison to IRC, so unless
you have a specific use in mind, it may make more
sense to use Homer and a private channel on IRC
than It does to attempt to run your own Chat Server.
Chat was originally created by the ubiquitous Peter
Lewis. It was significantly updated by Nathan
Neulinger, who has made It shareware and charges
$ 10 .
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Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 545
Co-motion Lite for Internet
Chatting is all fine and nice, but what about when you
really need to do some brainstorming? That’s when
you need a commercial application from Bittco
Solutions called Co-motion Lite for Internet, which is
a network brainstorming application that works over
the Internet. Other versions, including a fully featured
version called Co-motion, work over AppleTalk
networks. Co-motion Lite for Internet was designed
to encourage collaboration and idea generation
among a group of people, and It Includes tools for
annotating and evaluating ideas, as well as tools for
printing a variety of reports about what was dis-
cussed during a session. Co-motion Lite for Internet
isn’t one of those applications that you’ll pick up
immediately, but If it helps you avoid plane trips, it
will be well worth every penny. The program is
commercial, but has massive discounts that range
from $1.50 to $15 per copy. Contact Bittco Solutions
at bittco@ccinet.ab . ca or call 800-265-2726;
403-922-5514; 403-922-2859 (fax). For a demo, try
checking out Bittco’s Keen Minds package, which is
based on Co-motion Lite for Internet, but it is
specifically designed to work with online meetings
Bittco holds every now and then.
CU-SeeMe
Cornell University’s free CU-SeeMe (primarily written
by Tim Dorcey) provides videoconferencing over the
Internet. Nothing more, nothing less, but if you’ve
seen the prices for some of the videoconferencing
software available, you realize what an incredible
accomplishment this program is. To use CU-SeeMe
to receive video, you need a MacTCP-based Internet
connection, the faster the better. If you want to send
video as well, you must have a video camera and a
video-capable Mac, such as a 660AV, a video-input
card, or a Connectix QuIckCam. And of course, audio
requires a microphone. You can use CU-SeeMe in
either point-to-point mode with another person or In
broadcast mode with a CU-SeeMe reflector, which
enables you to view up to eight windows simulta-
neously. I often use 132.236.91.204, which Is one of
Cornell’s reflectors. CU-SeeMe works its magic by
only transmitting information that has changed in the
image — that significantly reduces the amount of data
it must pump over the Internet. CU-SeeMe is free for
both the Mac and the PC, although the Mac version Is
well ahead of the PC one.
ftp : / /gated . Cornell . edu / pub/ video/
http://cu-seeme.cornell.edu/
Part IV
546 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Homer
Homer is the killer app for Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
It enables you to participate in worldwide Internet
chats from the comfort of your Mac. Homer has a
colorful and unique interface that makes using IRC
significantly easier because it simplifies switching
channels, keeping multiple discussions going, giving
and taking operator privileges, and much more. In
recent releases of the $25 shareware Homer, creator
Toby Smith added support for Apple’s PlainTalk
technology, so Homer can speak all or some of what
goes on in your IRC discussion. With the addition of
Face resources, it can even display a picture of the
people with whom you’re typing.
ircle
Olaf Titz's free ircle 2.0f2 takes a more traditional
approach to IRC than does Homer, although it has
some nice features such as user-definable shortcuts
for common phrases, the capability of capturing a
conversation to a file, and font and size control. The
most recent version adds color support and sound
support, and can even speak incoming text, much
like Homer. Considering that Homer seems to have
been ignored for some time, ircle may well be worth
checking out if you use IRC much at all.
Ircle ®q”‘
a simple ire client for the Macintosh
byOnnoR.Tijc^t
concept by Olaf Tits
This Is free software, no warranty
this Is version; 2.0(2
[ Help ] GO
Maven
Along with Cornell’s CU-SeeMe, Maven, from the
University of Illinois at Urbana, goes a long way
toward turning the Internet Into a general-purpose
communication medium. Where CU-SeeMe provides
video (and has audio support using Maven's code),
Maven provides only audio. In some respects this
seems silly, since a telephone does exactly the same
thing, and generally for less money, but with the
costs of international phone calls, I could see
programs such as Maven becoming all too popular
(In fact, they might seriously overload the networks).
When I last tried Maven, it didn’t work over dialup
connections, but the Maven code in CU-SeeMe
definitely works over faster dedicated connections
and sort of over a 28.8 Kbps PPP connection. Maven
was written by Charley Kline, and may be freely
redistributed.
Mouen I
Chapter 17 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany/ 547
Meeting Space
The idea of an online virtual environment is powerful,
and a small company called World Benders has
brought it to the Macintosh world. Don’t think of
MUDs as games; think of them as online spaces —
places where you can do things and interact with
other people. That’s the Idea behind Meeting Space,
and it’s one that becomes especially attractive when
paired with a simple Macintosh interface. There's no
need to type commands or to know how to pro-
gram— in Meeting Space almost everything is in plain
view. Although World Benders could have supported
sound and video, they stuck to text to reduce the
network traffic (Meeting Space works well over both
AppleTalk and TCP/IP, even slow PPP or SLIP
connections) and hardware requirements. Creating
new places and objects in Meeting Space is simple,
and moving among places and working with
objects is equally simple. For pricing details and
more information, contact World Benders at
wb-info@woridbender8.com, or call 603/881-5432
(voice & fax).
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NetPhone
Where Maven pioneered, NetPhone has colonized.
NetPhone Is a commercial application from Andrew
Green of Electric Magic. NetPhone costs $59 for one
copy or $99 for a pair, but it can pay for Itself pretty
easily if you’re racking up massive international
telephone bills. In large part because NetPhone does
work over a 14.4 Kbps modem connection via PPP
or SLIP (although you do need to know the other
person’s IP number to connect). NetPhone also
works with pretty much any Macintosh from the llsi
on up, although It does work better on the faster
Macs because of ail the processing that goes on. In
my testing, NetPhone performed admirably, although
the sound quality wasn’t good enough that I'd use it
In favor of a local phone call. NetPhone comes with a
small application called NetPhone Alert that alerts
when someone is trying to call you with NetPhone.
You can try out a demo of NetPhone before buying —
it doesn’t include NetPhone Alert and Is limited to 90
second outgoing calls, although you can use It to
receive calls of any length.
mm
About NetPhone i
NetPhone
Cut9o1n9 cdtU HmHtd
to 90 socondt duration
O 1994-99, All Rights R»SM-y«d
Electric Magic
http: //wv/w. emagic.com/
Tools
All of these applications are fine and nice, but what if they don't quite do what you want?
What if you want to provide a custom Internet service that alerts the user whenever traffic
gets really bad in a certain part of town, or some other unique use? Your best chance.
Part IV
548 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
short of becoming a talented MacTCP programmer, is the TCP/IP Scripting Addition.
But other tools exist out there, such as Peter Lewis's unusual Script Daemon, which
enables you to Telnet to a Macintosh and issue commands in the form of pre-written
AppleScripts. Or, perhaps most importantly, you might need to control a Macintosh over
the Internet, and for that, Farallon's Timbuktu Pro is just what you need. So read on, and
see if any of these tools might fill a need that you've got.
Timbuktu Pro
If you need to control a Macintosh Internet server, or 510-814-5000; 510-814-5023 (fax). There’s a free trial
If you need to help Mac users In your organization, version that works for a week on three Macs, and
you need Farallon's Timbuktu Pro remote-control there's more Information on Farallon’s Web site,
application for use over both AppleTalk and the
Internet. Timbuktu enables you to observe or control
a remote Macintosh, and you can also exchange files
with the remote Mac. Timbuktu Pro has worked well
for the time I’ve spent administrating an SE/30-based
Gopher server. The Macintosh lives elsewhere, but
it’s directly connected to the Internet, and I can check
in any time with Timbuktu Pro. Although Timbuktu
Pro’s speed is impressive, it’s still slower than
normally using a Mac. However, programs run at full
speed on the host Mac — the only slowdown Is in
screen redraw. Mail order prices seem to run at
approximately $140 for one user, and you can
contact Farallon at info@farallon.com or call
Neui Connection £r^ —
1 TCP/IP ▼!
IP address
4D
|timbuktu.fQrQllon.com| |
CONIMl
Typelntha n«me or address of the
host you vish to connect to.
m
oatoivt
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163.176.4.43
A name should be of the form
t1mbutctu.fara1lon.com
R
UNO run
Note that names vlth ♦ symbols ere
e-mail addresses, not host names.
Try replacing the ♦with a period (.)
or contact the host to fi nd out the address
d
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ftp://ftp.farallon.com/pub/farallon.products/timbuktu.products/freeversions/
http://Nwvw.farallon.com/
TCP/IP Scripting Addition
I've muttered about AppleScript here and there in
this book, but always In the context of being able to
script a program. With the release of the TCP/IP
Scripting Addition from AtuI Butte, however, those of
you who are fluent In AppleScript can create entire
Internet applications without leaving AppleScript.
Since, for most people, AppleScript Is an easier
programming environment than something such as C
or Pascal, I’m curious to see to what purposes
people put the TCP/IP Scripting Addition. It comes
with some impressive sounding sample applications,
including an application on which you can drop a file
to have It uploaded via FTP, a simple Rnger
implementation, a script that displays the weather in
Washington, DC (In case you’re concerned about the
political climate), a script that can send email, and
finally a full Gopher server. The TCP/IP Scripting
Addition is free for personal use, and if you plan to
distribute a free program based on it, it’s probably
also free. For anything written to support an organiza-
tion or for sale purposes, there are various charges.
TCP/IP Scripting Addition
ftp : / /gaea . kgs . ukans . edu /applescript /osaxen/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/util/
Chapter 27 ♦ Utilities & Miscellany 549
Script Daemon
Script Daemon is yet another tiny background
application from Peter Lewis. It enables you to telnet
to your Macintosh from another machine and enter
AppleScript commands. Needless to say, it requires
MacTCP, System 7 or later, AppleScript, and only
allows the owner (using the Owner name and
password) to log in (mostly for security reasons, I
suspect). Peter states up front that Script Daemon is
rather rough, which is one reason he released it for
free and without many features. He's waiting to see
how people attempt to use it and what questions and
suggestions they have, before he spends any more
time on it. Script Daemon only makes much sense If
you have a permanent connection to the Internet.
Still, being able to telnet to a Macintosh and then
enter AppleScript commands and run AppleScript
scripts is a neat idea, so If you can imagine how you
would use this, check out Script Daemon.
Script Daemon
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Concluding the Cacophony
I think you'll agree after skimming through this chapter (you didn't read every word, did
you?) that there are a ton of miscellaneous Internet programs out there, and that's only for
the Macintosh. But that's good! The more programs that are available, the more choices
you have and the more likely you are to find one that does precisely what you want. We
all use the Internet for different purposes, and I'm sure that you will find some of the
programs I've discussed in this chapter useful. I personally use Internet Config, Finger,
Talk, and MacWeather constantly, and there are certainly plenty of others that I could
imagine using in different situations. Let your imagination guide you to applications that
you can use.
Okay, it's time to buckle down and look at some serious programs, the heav)" duty
integrated Internet programs from Synergy and InterCon Systems.
Part IV
Chapter
Integrated Programs
Perhaps one of the most requested programs has been an integrated program for access-
ing all of the Internet services. In fact, two integrated programs on the Mac already exist.
InterCon's TCP /Connect II and Synergy's VersaTerm-Link both do a good job in this
area, and that's my first answer to those seeking an integrated Internet program. There's
also Microphone Pro 2.0 from Software Ventures, which sort of fits into this category,
based not so much on what it can do as on what's bundled with it. More on these pro-
grams in a bit.
My second answer to those seeking an integrated program is itself a question. Why would
you want an integrated Internet program? That's like wanting an integrated Macintosh
program that subsumes all the functions of the programs that you have on your Mac. A
program that could concurrently play Maelstrom (a fabulous Asteroids-like shareware
game available on the nets), edit word-processing documents, and check your disk for
viruses sounds a little ludicrous, doesn't it?
Similarly, there are simply too many Internet services that have nothing in common — just
as it makes no sense to combine Maelstrom with Disinfectant, nor does it make sense to
combine CU-SeeMe and Gopher. They're simply different programs, and an interface that
works for video does nothing for navigating a menu-based Gopher interface.
Integrated programs are always notable by what features they don't support. Internet
integrated programs are no exception, and there will always be something they don't do,
be it the Web, CU-SeeMe-like video, or something new.
Finally, we're entering the age of software components. With Apple's OpenDoc and
Microsoft's OLE, it will become possible to write tightly focused components that do one
thing and do it well. In an ideal world, you'll be able to assemble modules from different
552 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
vendors (the small programmer will theoretically once again be able to compete with the
software monoliths currently dominating the market) to create a customized Internet tool
that does exactly what you want and no more. Adding features will be as simple as
adding a new module, and you won't pay for features you never use.
Enough pontificating — the commercial integrated Internet applications do a good job and
are ideal for some people. The following discussion should help you decide if you're one
of those people.
I don't go into the details of how to configure TCP / Connect II or VersaTerm-Link because
they both come with decent manuals, and I'm more interested in giving you information
to help you decide if you need to buy one of them.
TCP /Connect II
TCP/ Connect II comes from InterCon, the company that made InterSLIP freely available
to the Internet community. TCP/ Connect II is a package of TCP-based programs that
work equally well on dedicated Internet connections, via PPP or SLIP, via the Communi-
cations Toolbox, or even via a dedicated serial port driver for use over a standard modem
to a Unix shell account. TCP /Connect II comes in five flavors: Remote, Basic, 3270, VT,
and Extended. Each offers different set features and different list prices, ranging from
$195 to $495. Unfortunately, only the most expensive Extended edition includes all of the
various Internet features that I discuss below.
To confuse matters, InterCon has released a number of variants on the standard TCP/
Connect II package, such as TCP /Connect II Remote, which doesn't use MacTCP, limiting
users to just the TCP /Connect II modules. InterCon has announced, but not yet shipped,
three additional products, NetShark (which sounds like a renamed TCP/ Connect II),
MailShark (which may be the email module of TCP /Connect II), and WebShark (which is
probably the Web module from TCP /Connect II). I don't fault InterCon for attempting to
fill as many niches as possible, but it does become difficult to track.
TCP/Connect II doesn't come with a separate implementation of SLIP or PPP, but it
includes support for both internally. This means that if you only have TCP/ Connect II
and you connect via its PPP or SLIP, you cannot use Anarchie or Netscape or any other
separate program. How^ever, TCP/ Connect II works fine with MacPPP and InterSLIP, so
there's no need to use its internal PPP or SLIP capabilities if you don't want to.
Email
In terms of email, TCP /Connect provides all the basic features with a few interesting
twists that those who receive a lot of email can especially appreciate. You can modify the
order and size of each of the panels at the top of each mailbox window like "demo's in
box" shown in figure 28.1, so the From, Date, and Subject fields can all be customized to
your taste. An icon to the left of each message indicates its status, and the icons at the top
of the windows provide access to common commands.
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 553
1 (Jemn’s in boH |
□ 1 N^vMsg
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|From
II Subject II Date |
ggFjc^rtou
Whafs On Tonitel Sun Apt 2T. Pacific Fri, 21 Apr 1995 1 1 :37 :13 •
KS?) Adim C. Engst
Inline attachments
Sat, 22 Apr 1995 21 :23:27
Inline altachmerils
^ ,i!^ i Q. ! 1>J R^ply Forvard I - *! Resend
From: | ace<?tidbTts.com (Adam C. Engst) | Subject: | hline attachments
Just uuant to test this Inline attchment feoture. . .
□
a-and-t.jpg (gd)
document
Type: BinHex
TidBITS* Fifth!
n))u sound file
— ^ Type : BinHex
MoviePlayer document (shovn below)
Mail Status
- Incoming POP Mail Status “
Idle
•Outgoing SMTP Mail Status -
idle
•Mail Filing Status-
Idle
MailboH List
fPl New Open fWI Delete
Unread Total
(HI demo’s In Boh 1
Not Uery Serious Mail 0
Purgatory
Sample Mail
Test Mall
9J
Figure 28.1 TCP/Connect II email windows.
Like Eudora and VersaTerm-Link, TCP /Connect II can operate in offline mode, so
messages you send don't go out until you do connect. However, you must make sure to
change the Network options from MacTCP to None in the Configuration panel; other-
wise, TCP/ Connect II assumes it is connected to a network. Luckily, if you use TCP/
Connect ITs internal SLIP or PPP capabilities, InterCon has an unsupported Remote
Networking Enabler that simplifies the process of connecting and disconnecting. There is
no Send Mail command for messages that you've queued — TCP /Connect II sends them
sometime after you've reconnected to your network and reconfigured it from within
TCP/Connect II. You can see what TCP/Connect thinks is happening by looking at the
Mail Status window.
You can move mail among multiple mailboxes, either via the Refile button at the top of
the mailbox and message windows, or more reasonably, by dragging the messages icon to
a different mailbox. TCP /Connect II provides a Mailboxes window that lists all of your
mailboxes along with the number of total and unread messages in each.
Part IV
554 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Something that no other email program can do as far as I know is display certain types of
attachments inline. The message in figure 28.1 shows a test I sent myself from Eudora
with a JPEG image (which didn't work for some reason), a sound file, and a QuickTime
movie (both of which did work when 1 played them). You also can save the attachments
to disk by merely dragging them to the Finder. The reverse works as well, so you can drag
files to a message to attach them, and they appear, with icons, inside your text, which is
neat. Also note that TCP /Connect II is not limited to 32K in its message windows — a
welcome feature.
TCP/ Connect IPs most impressive mail feature is its Mail Actions feature. It enables you
to filter mail based on specific items in the headers or bodies of messages. People who get
a lot of mail need a feature like this one. You can use mail actions to put mail from a
certain mailing list in a specific mailbox to read at your leisure (as I've done in figure
28.2), or you can have mail from your boss highlighted so that you see it instantly each
morning.
Globol Mail Rctioiu
IJDJ N»w Action ij'' ] Edtt Action I Q I Rtmovt Action ' 1 Nov Annotation
If • Fiold "TidBITS* Uirfi .vt«jle «r>-J 1" TidBiT'
Edit Action
Action Ruk
Look In:
I Subject Field
For something that: | Contains
□ Case-sensitiue comparisons
n Disregard follouilng actions
Highlighting for existing and nev messages;
^Boid □ Underline
□ italic □Outline
□ Use * and ? tulldcards
Foreground Color:
Background Color: Q
Operations performed on new messages ontg :
ONo marking, deleting, refiling, or copging
O Mark As Read O^enieTo:
O Delete ® Copg To:
TidBiTS Issues
] Mark As Read in destination of Aefile or Copg [ Cancel ]\[ OK
Figure 282 TCPIConnect II Mail Actions.
A limited variant on this feature, called Select Messages, enables you to use some of the
same filtering techniques on already existing messages in a mailbox. After you select
them, you can then refile or delete them. In addition, if you only want to find a single
message in a mailbox or find some text within a message, TCP /Connect IPs Edit menu
contains several Find commands that should help out. If you do a Find within the Mail-
boxes window, TCP /Connect searches through all of your mailboxes for the search string.
Unfortunately, unlike most other email programs, when you delete a message by select-
ing it and pressing Delete, the message is gone right away (although you can use Undo to
recover it immediately afterward).
Note
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 555
Even though there's no intermediate Trash mailbox in TCPIConnect II, you can certainly
create your own Trash mailbox and use it as your own personal email purgatory.
In my testing of large messages, TCP /Connect II transferred them faster than I was
expecting, something that you learn to appreciate when you start using email heavily.
Other new and important features include a new address book with support for groups
and drag and drop. It also can import other files, like the Eudora Nicknames file, although
the format of the original file can result in some odd entries in TCP /Connect IPs address
book.
Overall, I find TCP /Connect IPs mail client to be quite good, although the lack of a Trash
mailbox and the irritating way it immediately sends outgoing messages when you're
connected (I prefer to queue everything in case I wish to edit a message before sending),
set it behind Eudora.
Usenet News
TCP /Connect's newsreader has a three-pane interface that shows you the newsgroups to
which you're subscribed (although that process takes some time), the subjects of the
messages in the selected group, and the text of the selected article (see figure 28.3).
conp . sys
conp . sys
conp . sys
conp . sys
conp. sys
conp . sys
conp . sys
conp. sys
conp . sys
conp . sys
comp . sys
comp . sys
comp . sys
comp . sys
comp. sys
comp . sys
.sys
nac . odoococy
mac . announce
. mac apps
. nac . comm
. mac da tabases
.mac. digest
. mac . games
. nac . graph i cs
. mac . hardware
. mac . hardware .raise
. mac . hardwar e . s toroge
. mac . hardware . u i deo
. mac . hypercard
.mac. mi sc
. mac . oop . nocappS
. mac . oop .raise
mac . oop. tcl
comp . sys . mac .printing
comp . sys . mac . programmer . codew
comp . sys . mac . programmer .help
coffp . sys . mac . programmer info
comp . sys . mac . programmer . m I sc
comp . sys . raac . programner . too I s
comp . sys . moc . sc i tech
conp . sys . nac . sys ten
comp . sys . mac . won led
news . onnounce . newusers
news newusers . quest I ons
neius.halcyon.com
Re: Mac Rcoustic Coupler? Bob Nichols
Re : llacPPP and flpp I e Express Modem Dan K 1 1 cup
Fr om : car y I uPoo I . con ( Car yLu )
Newsgroups : conp . sys . mac . por tab I es
Subject: Re: I want to play color games In b&w
Date: 19 Apr 1995 15:35:54 -D400
Drganiration: America On I ine, Inc. <1-800-027-6364)
<<There ■♦^ust^ be sorae kind of progrora that makes a B&U computer think
It’s hooked up to a 256-color monitor, for the purpose of games) >
Vou can do this with any PowerBook that has a video output. Plug In the
video adapter coble, attach a UOfl odapter <but no monitor), Sot video to
mirror mode. The color Image will appear on your Internal screen (set
internal screen for as many grays as you have got).
Problems:
1. PowerBooks with 4D0 pixel high screen will cut off the bottom 80
pixels
2. Performance rather sluggish, too slow for some games.
3. Some software manipulates palettes so you only see foreground activity
on the Internal PowerBook screen.
— Cary Lu PowerBook Notes columnist, Macworld magazine
Figure 28.3 TCP/Connect II Neivs window.
Part IV
556 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
You can drag the Subject, From, and Date panels at the top of the subjects pane to deter-
mine which piece of information shows up where. You also can resize each of these fields
and adjust the font as desired. And, as in the mail windows, the small buttons at the top
of the news window enable you to create new articles, print existing ones, file them in
your mailboxes (a nice integration of email and news), and reply, forward, and followup
to postings. You subscribe to newsgroups with the Edit Newsgroups command in the
Services menu, but even though you drag newsgroups from the full list of groups over to
a list of your subscribed groups, the interface feels as though it hasn't been updated to
work like the rest of the program. (I would think you'd get a full group list, as in
NewsWatcher and drag newsgroups into your newsreading window.)
Unless you explicitly select a QuickStart button when you connect to your news server,
TCP /Connect II downloads what it calls the "Active File" each time you connect, which is
a major pain, and even on my 56K dedicated connection, it took 90 seconds. In addition,
navigation in the TCP /Connect II newsreader is mediocre, and it's easy, if you use the
arrow keys, to accidentally hit the left or right arrows, which move you up and down in
the newsgroup list, rather than in the article list (which is what the up and down arrows
do). Because TCP /Connect II is slow to bring in the subjects and authors for a large
group, if you accidentally move out of a newsgroup, it's painful to have to wait for it to
bring in the subjects and authors yet again.
Equally unfortunate, TCP/Connect IPs newsreader isn't threaded. It can sort messages by
subject, but that never quite solves the problem, especially because, unlike VersaTerm-
Link, there's no way to select multiple messages and then read them all at once. However,
TCP /Connect II's filtering system helps significantly with the lack of threads. If you are
interested only in certain subjects or postings from certain people, you can use filters to
highlight them in some way so that it's easy to find them during your reading session.
You also can use filters to mark articles as read or to delete them. By marking uninterest-
ing articles as read, or deleting them, you can reduce the amount of news that you see in
the newsgroup.
TCP/Connect II's newsreader simply doesn't measure up to any of the main freeware and
shareware newsreaders, and although it does have offline capabilities, they're somewhat
poorly implemented. TCP /Connect II just goes out and dowmloads all the new messages
in your subscribed groups. You can't even cancel the process once you've started it unless
you quit the entire program. If you want good offline news with filtering, use
NewsHopper.
FTP
The FTP client in TCP/ Connect II is mediocre and doesn't even begin to compete with
Anarchie or Fetch. It forces you to enter a userid and password in modal dialogs, al-
though if you hold down the Option key and select FTP (Anonymous) from the Services
menu, TCP /Connect II fills in the standard userid and password for you. You also can
Note
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 557
define commonly used sites and select them from a menu, but I think the easiest way to
connect to an FTP site is by choosing Open URL from the Services menu and typing or
pasting in an FTP URL. After you connect, the window looks similar to Apple's old Font/
DA Mover (see figure 28.4).
pRnguin.tldblts.com
DoLunlQQdsI
Ruto
OBSCII
O Image
ftp.tidbits.com
|Q tidbits]
D RTHELP.HLP
128K
0 MacBinary
CD .
IK
2
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1234K
CD ..
IK
E) Desktop Strip-1l-PressReieose
3K
11 Copy 11
□ .message
2K
CD Easylyper euol
□ dominatlng-mactcp-draftetH
63K
□ Emailer I.0a55 Installer
1137K
[ Remoue J
D issues
IK
CD GMOL folder
f Rename... 1
CD mirror
IK
□ Icon
OK
CD misc
IK
CD Keen Minds
[ Options... ]
D priuate
IK
CD KickStart |
D select
IK
5
[ Desktop ) [ Eject
[ Set Directory...
Transfer complete.
Jll
Figure 28.4 TCP/Connect 11 FTP window.
The list on the left shows the folder on your Mac where files are placed when you retrieve
them (you also can move them from that or any other folder onto the FTP site if upload-
ing is allowed). The right-hand window shows the files on the remote host.
TCP/Connect II also has a single list view that's more like the older version of Fetch, but
you're still limited to a single connection.
There's no drag and drop, unlike other parts of the interface, and you can only connect to
one site at a time. Although you can and should add FTP URLs to TCP /Connect ITs
hotlists, you cannot select an item in an FTP window and choose Add to Main Hot List
from the Services menu, as you can with Gopher items and Web pages.
When you retrieve a file from an FTP site, TCP /Connect II does automatically debinhex
or uudecode, and if you have Aladdin's Stuffit Engine installed, it automatically expands
the file.
I cannot recommend that you use the TCP/ Connect II FTP client; it has too many prob-
lems that Fetch and Anarchie don't share. The only exception to this rule comes when you
click an FTP URL in the Web browser — the integration is useful enough that it's not worth
switching out to a better FTP client.
Part IV
558 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Telnet
TCP /Connect II provides a good environment for using Telnet-based services. You can
have multiple windows open at once, and in the Extended version you also have access to
a slew of different terminal types. For frequently used commands, you can define up to 20
macros that are attached to any key or combination of keys on the keyboard.
There isn't much else to say about the Telnet features in TCP /Connect II mostly because
they work fine and provide access to Telnet-based hosts. I cannot imagine what sort of
features you could really add to a Telnet client that haven't been added already.
Gopher
TCP/ Connect II, in an attempt to provide access to all the major Internet services, has
added a Gopher client. It's extremely similar to TurboGopher; it opens multiple windows,
displays text, and unlike TurboGopher, displays GIF and JPEG graphics that you retrieve.
The mimicking of TurboGopher even extends to the small windows that TCP /Connect
II's Gopher client uses as status windows for file downloads (see figure 28.5).
Figure 28.5 TCP/Connect II Gopher windows.
The one odd part about the Gopher client in TCP /Connect II is that you'd expect to be
able to drag items out of Gopher windows and into other windows, such as an email
window, where it could attach the URL, or to a hotlist window. Unfortunately, you can't,
although you can drag selected text from within a text window and place it in a mail
message or in the Finder as a text clipping.
TCP/ Connect II has multiple hotlists that can hold a variety of URL types, including
mailto, FTP, Gopher, and HTTP URLs, but not WAIS or news URLs. Although why you'd
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 559
want to put a mailto URL in your hotlist rather than make an address book entry, I don't
know.
What's neat about the integration of the modules with TCP/ Connect II is that it can pass
off different URLs to the appropriate module. So, if you're in the Web browser and click a
Gopher link, TCP /Connect II opens a Gopher window rather than simulating it in the
Web browser window. Same goes for FTP, although not yet for news URLs, which just fail
whenever you click on them.
The Gopher client in TCP/ Connect II is quite good. It's fast and, for TurboGopher users,
familiar. It integrates well with the other modules for the most part, and does more than
other Gopher clients by displaying or playing graphics, sounds, and movies without
needing a helper application.
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web browser in TCP/ Connect II is the program's most important recent
addition. Let's face it, an integrated program without a Web browser (a category in which
VersaTerm-Link unfortunately fits) simply isn't chic in today's Internet.
Although the Web browser has a few rough edges and isn't as configurable as the other
stand-alone Web browsers (see figure 28.6), it has all the necessary features, such as
supporting HTML forms, making it easy to enter a URL, and having multiple hotlists
(which support other modules as well).
Figure 28.6 TCP/Connect II Web browser configuration.
The Web browser can expire read links after a specified number of days, and you can set
the colors for the links, the text, and the background. You cannot set styles particularly,
although you can choose between small, medium, and large text size settings. Although
you cannot manually open more windows, if you select "Open a new window for each
user-specified URL" in the Web browser's configuration and if you choose Open URL
Part IV
560 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
from the Services menu and enter a URL, you'll get an additional window (see figure
28.7). TCP/ Connect II also opens a new Web window if you drop an HTML file on its
icon — you cannot drop the HTML file into a visible Web window to display though, as
you can in Netscape.
internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
1 Horn*
B*clc Forv*rd J(^| R«)Md ' I Load
eE3 lUelcomc to InterCon Systems Corporation ^(22
j l5l Home Bock I^J Forvord Rekad U Lood Imoges
( Current URL: jht<p;//vw irjlercon com/intercon html |
Link URL: Ti
Page complete Image complete
Welcome to InterCon Systems
Corporation's World Wide Web
Server
1 What's available on this server ?
' InterCon Systems Corporation manufactures networking software
^ for Macintosh and Windows based computers. On this server you
will find information about our products and demonstration copies
- of our software.
r
Rease feel free to download our products and give them a try.
liL
Figure 28.7 TCP/Connect Web browser windows.
Several features set the TCP /Connect II Web browser apart from most of the competition.
First off, it's as fast or even faster than Netscape, in part because it uses the same multiple
connection scheme. I suspect the rest of the speed comes from InterCon's long experience
with programming TCP/IP applications — at a functional level, their code is among the
most mature. The Web browser does support inline JPEG images, like Netscape, and if
you download a QuickTime movie (or probably any other file type, like a System 7 sound,
that TCP /Connect II supports), you can play it right in TCP/ Connect II. One welcome
feature is that when you're downloading a file, TCP /Connect II opens a separate small
progress window for it, so you can use the main Web browser window to continue
exploring.
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 561
InterCon made heavy use of drag and drop in the Web browser interface, so you can drag
URLs to your hotlist to save them, and you can drag items from the hotlist back to the
Web window to move to that item. Unfortunately, since you cannot select text in the Web
browser, you can't drag selected text to a mail window, say, to send to a friend.
You can have multiple hotlists and have more than one open at a time, so InterCon avoids
the problem of not having a hierarchical hotlist feature, although I find the hotlists a bit
clumsier than Netscape's bookmarks. Icons to the left of each entry indicate which service
the URL will use; you can see the icons for FTP (ftp . tidbits . com). Gopher (Seattle
USA), and the Web (Yahoo) in figure 28.8.
Figure 28.8 TCP/Connect II Hot List.
Finally, TCP /Connect ITs Web browser stands out because of its integration with the
other parts of TCP/ Connect II. Whereas in Netscape, clicking a mailto URL brings up a
small window for composing a message, clicking a mailto link in TCP /Connect II brings
up a new message using the full-featured email module. The same is true for FTP and
Gopher, although surprisingly, not news. I strongly approve of using interfaces designed
for a specific service like Gopher, rather than attempting to shoehorn everything into a
single Web browser interface.
I give the TCP /Connect II Web browser high marks — although it's not as polished as
Netscape, its speed and integration gives it the edge over MacWeb and Mosaic. Unfortu-
nately, you wouldn't use TCP/ Connect II for just the Web browser — the program is way
too big and expensive for that. If InterCon's forthcoming WebShark is indeed a stand-
alone version of the TCP /Connect II Web module, it may be worth a look.
Other Utilities
Although they are somewhat hidden by the many other modules in TCP /Connect II that
have a higher profile, the program does support a number of utility protocols. You can
finger someone or look up information about them using the Ph protocols. If you need to
figure out the IP number of a machine from the IP name, you can do that, and the reverse
process is equally as easy. You can ping other Internet machines to see if they're working,
and the Whois support enables you to find out more information about a machine or a
domain.
Part IV
562 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
More useful on an everyday basis will be TCP/ Connect IPs spelling features, available in
the Spelling hierarchical menu in the Edit menu. They provide interactive spelling (as you
write) or can check documents after the fact. Other text utilities are available in the Format
hierarchical menu under the Edit menu as well, so if you've ever wanted to reflow a badly
formatted piece of text or "unquote" a selection, these utilities are ideal.
You won't buy TCP/ Connect II based on these utilities, or even particularly let them
sway your decision. However, if you do decide to buy the program, they are welcome
additions.
Evaluation & Details
TCP /Connect II has several problems. First, due in part to the accretive process by which
InterCon has added modules and functionality, the interface is internally inconsistent,
which is more frustrating than dealing with the inconsistency of separate programs
because there you expect to see differences. In my opinion, InterCon has great code
underneath, but they need to scrap the interface and start over, putting an emphasis on
similar interfaces and consistent use of drag and drop, which is a powerful tool in an
integrated program. I'd also like to see all of TCP /Connect IPs tiny little icons at the top
of windows and in their icon bar (see figure 28.9) grow up a bit so you stand a chance at
recognizing them and so they're easier to click.
Figure 28.9 TCPIConnecl II icon bar.
The second problem TCP/ Connect II faces is that it's not really designed for a single user
trying to access the Internet, and that's primarily the sort of person at whom I've aimed
this book. As a result, TCP /Connect II seems to compare poorly with the free and
shareware programs on the net. However, the fact is that TCP/Connect provides many
features that aren't really interesting to the single user or someone accessing the Internet
via dialup, such as being able to set up your own FTP server, use local PostScript printers
for DEC pass-through printing, and act as a Finger or SMTP server.
On the positive side, TCP /Connect II obviously has a lot of good code in it. It succeeds in
its goal of being an integrated Internet program thanks to the addition of the Gopher and
Web clients since previous versions. Being able to select a URL sent to you in email and to
choose Open Selection as URL from the Services menu (or press Ji^-Option-L) are handy
features used to best utilize the different modules, although it would be nice if future
versions supported the Command-click standard for resolving URLs.
TCP/Connect II 2.1.2 also is Power Mac-native, which should significantly improv^e its
speed on a Power Macintosh, and you can install either Power Mac-native code only, or a
fat binary version that works on both 68000 Macs and Power Macs.
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 563
1 get the impression that TCP /Connect II is aimed at large organizations that want a
single solution to a lot of problems, and they want to have someone to call when they're
confused. I've had occasion to call InterCon a couple of times, and their tech support
people have always been friendly and helpful. In the end, I cannot recommend that you
as an individual spend $495 on a package that doesn't meet your needs, especially noting
the standard freeware and shareware utilities which are readily available.
You can purchase TCP /Connect II 2.1.2 direct from InterCon Systems for $495. There also
are many different pricing tiers based on volume and whether you work at an educational
institution (60 percent off) or for the government (15 percent off). TCP/Comiect II also
should be available from some dealers and at a discount from some mail order vendors.
Although you can download a free demo version of TCP /Connect II, you must request a
demo key to unlock the program before being able to use it. Check their Web page for
details and the form for requesting a demo key. For more information, contact InterCon
electronically at sales@intercon.com, or call 703-709-5500; 703-709-5555 (fax).
http: / /WWW . intercon . com/intercon . html
ftp://ftp.intercon.com/intercon/sales/
VersaTerm-Link
Synergy Software's VersaTerm has been one of the preeminent terminal emulation
programs for years. Developed by Lonnie Abelbeck, of Abelbeck Software, VersaTerm
always seemed to support more terminal types than other terminal emulators, which
made it a favorite in academia, where strange terminal types are more common. In more
recent years, Lonnie updated VersaTerm to work with the Communications Toolbox, in
the process opening it up to MacTCP connections. I don't know the history for sure, but it
seems as though that introduction created additional interest in MacTCP utilities. Lonnie
then came out with VersaTilities, a package that included numerous Communications
Toolbox tools, including a Telnet tool, an FTP Client tool, a Terminal Server tool, and
others designed for Ethernet networks. Also included were a SLIP implementation, an
FTP server, a time server, and a simple application for using the FTP Client tool without
firing up a full-fledged terminal emulator.
All that stuff still exists in VersaTilities. Until the introduction of the free InterSLIP, it was
an excellent way to purchase a SLIP program. However, Lonnie added a new application,
called VersaTerm-Link, to the VersaTilities package, and that's what I'm going to concen-
trate on, because it is of most interest to the individual wanting to access the Internet.
VersaTerm-Link is an integrated client application for email, news. Finger, FTP, and
Telnet. I look quickly at each part of the program in turn, but in summary, none of the
parts quite compete with the best of the freeware or shareware applications I talked about
in previous chapters. The synergy created by the links between the different clients,
however, makes for some interesting capabilities. More on those links as I go.
Part IV
564 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
First, VersaTerm-Link provides a toolbar that enables you to access all of its parts with a
double-click or keystroke (see figure 28.10).
UersoTerm Link
Figure 28.10 VersaTerm-Link toolbar.
I find the need for a double-click odd, because most toolbars require only a single-click,
but the shortcut of being able to type a single key without even using the Command key
makes up for it. I'd also like to see the toolbar be somewhat configurable to accommodate
different working styles and programs.
Email
Although I'm not as fond of VersaTerm-Link's interface as Eudora's, there's a lot to like
here. You can have multiple mailboxes, and the program provides icons for indicating
mail status (see figure 28.11).
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©testing fron UersaTern-L flug-2‘1 17:57 From; Adam C. Engst <ace@tidb
Mail "Out Basket"
Send j|( Trash ]1| Moue ▼[
1 Shoui ▼!
;i Neiu )^( Open Jf?
Blest fron Uersoterm Link Jul-08 16:05 To: <
BOlSo u)hot do these faces 1 Rug-21 17:55 To: <
GaTest from UersaTerm-L 1 nk Rug-2‘1 18:05 To: <
BQRe: Serial HeusUatcher . . Rug-21 18:16 To: <
BRe: InterSLIPinq problem Ruq-21 18:29 To: F
ace@t idb its.com>
t idbi ts©halcyon.coin>
tonyae®nicrosoft .coni>
ace®t idbi ts.con>
Imanda Ualker <anando©int
Figure 28.11 VersaTerm-Link In and Out Baskets.
You can sort the messages, move them to another mailbox, trash them (and as in Eudora,
they are then moved to a special Trash mailbox), reply to them (and the text is quoted
automatically), and forward them. I don't see any command corresponding to Eudora's
Redirect command, and when you reply to a message, even if it includes only one person
in the header, VersaTerm-Link asks whether you want to reply to all or only the recipient.
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 565
VersaTerm-Link works offline in the sense that you can queue messages and send them
later. If you use VersaTerm SLIP, VersaTerm-Link automatically connects (asking whether
it's OK first), transfers your mail, and then disconnects. If you aren't using VersaTerm
SLIP, you must select the messages in your Out Basket to send, which is a minor pain.
In messages that you cannot edit, such as incoming mail and news, you are limited to
selecting entire lines. This interface decision is extremely odd because many people want
to copy an address or directory path from a message without getting everything else on
the line. One nice touch, though, is that with a message open (and this applies to news
articles as well) you can select Add to Address Book from the Edit menu, and VersaTerm-
Link adds the person to your address book.
The address book is generally well-done, enabling you to add people and groups, along
with notes about who they are. It's available whenever you create a new mail message or
news posting. You can enter an address into a message manually if you like, but unfortu-
nately there's no way to import that address into your address book with a single click.
It's a minor point, but a tad annoying.
VersaTerm-Link supports one or more enclosures to messages. If you so choose, it even
compresses them in the Stuffit format before binhexing them and sending them out as an
attachment to the message.
You cannot put more than approximately 30K of text in an outgoing message. I didn't
check this figure exactly, but it was easy to get VersaTerm-Link to complain that the
clipboard was too large to paste. In the most recent version of VersaTerm-Link a previous
limitation relating to the amount of text you could view in a message has disappeared.
Overall, the email part of VersaTerm link is good, but not great. You won't go wrong with
its simplicity, but you may wish for some of Eudora's features.
Usenet News
VersaTerm-Link's newsreader was the first implementation of a non-threaded newsreader
that I like. I didn't think it was possible because I'm addicted to reading and killing threads
while scanning Usenet. When you double-click on the toolbar's Read News icon,
VersaTerm-Link opens your Subscribed News Groups window (see figure 28.12).
comp.sys.moc.comm
Cd comp.sys.mac.announce
D comp.sys.mac.porlables
Q clan. feature. mlss-manners
C] clan. nb. apple
Q comp.sys.mac.m1sc
Pay Dovn Pa^a Up
I Parent Vkxiov
Figure 28.12 VersaTerm-Link Subscribed Groups window.
Part IV
566 Ifiteniet Starter Kit for Macintosh
If you want to subscribe to more groups, clicking the Groups button enables you to view a
list of either all groups or only the new ones that have appeared since you last checked.
When you open a group (groups that have new articles have a little folder icon next to
their name) from the Subscribed Groups window, VersaTerm-Link displays the
newsgroup window (see figure 28.13).
D Re: Opinion on Duo 230 vs. PB 170
D Re; Duo 230 Express Modem problems
D What's In the Duo Floppy?
D Re: What’s In the Duo Floppy?
D Re: What's in the Duo Floppy?
D Re: The new PB 1 65 and FPU
D Re: The new PB 1 65 and FPU
D Re: The new PB165 and FPU
D Re: August MacUser Duo Article
D Max charging of battery PBIOO?
D Better battery (NiCad) for PBIOO?
D Re: From PowerBook 160 To Duo - Impressions
D Re: From PowerBook 160 To Duo - Impressions
D Re: From PowerBook 160 To Duo - Impressions
Dovn _a
Parent Vindow
©Richard D. Doherty
©Colin Helllwell
©Ronald Leenes
©Michael Kwun
©Ron Nicholson
©Joe Simpson
©Christopher Llshka
© Wen-Po Bobby Lee
©Michael Peirce
©Noam Nudelman
©E Pekka A Saarl
(Long ©Christopher Llshka
(Long) ©Harald Strlepe
(Long) ©Richard Kay
Figure 28.13 VersaTerm-Link Newsgroup window.
The trick here is that even though VersaTerm-Link doesn't understand threads (although
it can group articles with the same subjects), you scan through the list of new articles and
select the ones you want by Command-clicking on them. After you have selected articles,
you can read through them relatively easily by using the Spacebar to page down through
an article and using the Return key to move to the next selected article.
The steps described above are what you do if you connect via SLIP or PPP and want to
stay online. Most interesting, and VersaTerm-Link is still unusual in this regard, is that
you can alternately click the Receive to Disk button and VersaTerm-Link downloads all of
your selected articles as fast as it can, which is much faster than you can read. Later on,
you can check Local via Disk in the News menu (it's normally set to Remote via Network)
and read the news you saved just as though you were logged on. You can reply to mes-
sages, and forward them — and you can do all that offline as well, because VersaTerm-
Link knows how to queue both mail and news.
FTP
When it comes to FTP, unfortunately, VersaTerm doesn't hold a candle to Anarchie or
Fetch. Double-clicking the FTP Files button the toolbar opens the FTP Client List (see
figure 28.14).
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 567
Bp Configure... ]^[ Duplicate IH' Sort Neui |W| Open jpS|
Q ftp. apple. CO* ononynous /dts/noc
0 ftp. Intercon.co* ononynous /InlerCon/soles
[Q f 1 p . ncso . u i uc . edu anonymous
(P ftp. quo I CO**, com anonymous /pub
Q ftp.l idblls.com tidbits /pub/t idbits
0 su*ex-aim. Stanford. edu anonymous /info-*ac
±liiJ
01
Figure 28.14 VersaTertn-Link FTP Client List.
You can define shortcuts with the New button, and they appear in the list, as shown in
figure 28.14. However, there is no way to connect to an FTP site without creating a
shortcut for it in your list, and once you create one, it may take a bit of searching to realize
that the only way to delete it is by choosing Clear from the Edit menu (a fact that is buried
in the manual). All too often I want to connect to a site once, without creating a shortcut;
so even though the shortcut asks for the same information that Tm using in logging at
once, it feels slightly clumsier. Okay, maybe it's not that big of a deal.
When you double-click on an entry in your list to connect, though, you see the problem
(see figure 28.15).
Figure 28.15 VersaTerm-Link FTP window.
VersaTerm-Link doesn't display a large window, so some filenames extend past the
window, making it impossible to see their extensions. Even though you can use the Get
Info command to view a straight Unix directory listing for the file, VersaTerm-Link
doesn't show the file size as a matter of course, which I dislike. In addition, when you're
downloading a file, the program gives you a running count of the bytes transferred but
never tells you what kind of throughput you're getting, or how many bytes remain. I
often abort a file transfer if I'm getting poor throughput; poor throughput tells me that
something is wrong with the remote site, and they don't need to handle my download
just then. VersaTerm-Link doesn't try to determine the transfer type automatically by
Part IV
568 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
looking at the file extension, as Fetch and Anarchie do, and it has no facility for calling
another program to debinhex or expand the downloaded files after the fact.
The primary good thing about the FTP client in VersaTerm-Link is that you can have it
download in the background as you read news or email, although the same thing works
with Anarchie and Fetch and one of the free newsreaders.
Telnet
VersaTerm-Link's Telnet client resembles all other Telnet programs with the exception of
being able to define a login script when you create the shortcut for a site. Like the FTP
client, with Telnet you must create a shortcut; there's no provision for a one-time connec-
tion without saving that information.
If the Telnet client in VersaTerm-Link isn't powerful enough for you, you can open
another one, such as VersaTerm itself (because the entire VersaTilities package comes
with both VersaTerm and VersaTerm Pro) or presumably, NCSA Telnet. The Telnet client
isn't sufficient in two major areas. First, it supports only the "dumb" terminal type, which
prevents you from using Gopher via Telnet, for instance, because that requires a VTIOO
terminal type. Second, you can have only one Telnet session open at a time, unlike either
VersaTerm or NCSA Telnet.
Other Utilities
VersaTerm-Link can query Finger, Whois, and Ph servers (which are used to store phone
books of users, usually at universities), although using them is often an exercise in
frustration when you're looking for someone. Unlike Peter Lewis's Finger, with
VersaTerm-Link you must make sure to type the userid and the machine name in the
appropriate fields. Other utilities exist too, so you can find out the IP number that goes
with a domain name by using the Resolve Domain Name command in the Netw^ork
menu. And you can do all sorts of stuff using the Tools menu (see figure 28.16).
Tools
Mac » BinHoH 4.0
BinHoH 4.0 » Mac
Check Spelling... 8€L
Rot-13 ^3
Simple Priuocy...
Paste Signature dS4
Uieiu Tent File... 88J
Rrchlue Mail Tent...
Set Priulleges...
Figure 28.16 VersaTerm-Link Tools menu.
Note
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 569
You can encode and decode BinHex files, check spelling with the included dictionaty (a
nice touch, especially considering the abysmal spelling habits of many people on the
Internet), use rotl3 to encode or decode a news message, encrypt or decrypt a message
with a password that someone has given you, view a text file, or archive your mail to a
text file.
Interestingly, VersaTerm-Link includes the code used for the encnjption arid decryption in
the manual, and encourages others to implement it as a method of keeping messages private.
The encryption is not secure, in the sense that any good cryptographer could crack it quickly,
but it does discourage prying eyes.
Finally, a new addition to the Tools menu, the Set Privileges command, lets your pass-
word protect a number of parts of VersaTerm-Link to prevent others from messing with
them. Although I don't personally subscribe to such techniques, preferring education and
communication instead, it would be a good way to prevent a child from accessing unde-
sirable newsgroups or FTP sites.
VersaTerm-Link doesn't contain a Gopher or Web browser, but the Open Special Client
command in the Network menu enables you to link a single MacTCP application into
VersaTerm-Link. I'd like it even more if you could add one or more applications to your
toolbar, but I'm glad to see the VersaTerm-Link folks acknowledging that you might want
to use other software.
As a clever touch, VersaTerm-Link has a hierarchical Paste Face menu in the Edit menu
that lists and describes a number of the common smileys used on the Internet (see figure
28.17).
Undo
8§Z
Cut
Copy
Paste
Clear
Paste Rs Quote
se*
Paste Face
►
Select nil
dgn
Find...
Find Rgain
Rddress Book...
Rdd to Rddress Book
Scratchpad...
ae-l
(2)
<3) luink
(3)grin
(3) smirk
(3) laughing
(3) drooling
(2)
(3) 0^0*
(3) Oops!
(3) Oreat!
(3) Oh, no!
: (3) licking lips
3) puzzled
1(3) undecided
<35 Hmmmm
(3) asleep
(3) unbelieuable
(^3 luide-eyed
(3) ^roLun
^(3) oiad
(3) unhappy
(3) pouting
(3) sUout
i (3) Good grief!
Figure 28,17 VersaTerm-Link Paste Face menu.
Part IV
570 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Hidden in the back of the manual, I noticed one really neat feature. If you double-click a
word in any display text window (even though you can select only an entire line, you can
still double-click on a word), VersaTerm-Link searches for the next occurrence of that
word. You can continue searching forward for that same word by pressing the Tab key,
and Shift-Tab searches backward — that's elegant.
Speaking of the manual, although it's not inspired or particularly fun to read, it covers all
of VersaTerm-Link quite thoroughly. A separate manual talks about using all the connec-
tion and transfer tools included with the VersaTilities. With commercial software, much
of what you're paying for is the documentation and support (which I had no need to call),
so it's nice to see adequate manuals.
Evaluation & Details
Despite its many nice features, I cannot necessarily recommend that you spend $85 for
VersaTilities when you can use programs such as InterSLIP, Eudora, NewsWatcher,
NCSA Telnet, Anarchie, and Netscape. If they didn't exist, buying VersaTilities would be
a no-brainer, and Synergy deserves credit for pricing the package reasonably. You may
decide that the offline news reading feature and some nice integration between the
different parts of the program with items such as the Address Book and the spell check-
ing, make the cost worthwhile. And remember, even if you do agree that Anarchie is the
best FTP client, for instance, you can still use the rest of the VersaTerm-Link package quite
happily. There's no shame in not using one of a number of bundled features. Now, if only
you could reconfigure that toolbar with your favorites....
If, however, you are the sort of person who doesn't mind spending some money and
wants a set of utilities in a single package complete with full documentation and support,
VersaTilities is definitely a good way to go, especially in conjunction with a Web browser
like MacWeb or Netscape. I usually assume that people want to make this choice on their
own and spend the least amount of money possible because that's how I am, but I also
realize that many people prefer to spend some money and avoid the hassles.
You can buy VersaTerm-Link in the VersaTilities package for a list price of $145, in the
VersaTerm package for $195, or in the VersaTerm-Pro package for $295. All of these prices
are at least 30 to 40 percent lower if you buy through a mail-order vendor or direct from
Synergy. You can contact Synergy'^ to find out more about buying any of their programs
via the Internet at maxwell(asales. synergy. com, via phone at 215-779-0522, or via fax at
215-370-0548.
Other Integrated Programs?
Although VersaTerm-Link and TCP /Connect II truly are integrated programs, there's
another that almost fits into the category, MicroPhone Pro from Software Ventures. It's
more a bundle of software than an integrated program, though. Wait a minute! This book
is a bundle too — I'd better do a short capsule review of it here as well.
Chapter 28 ♦ Integrated Programs 571
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (IS KM) Is a book/
disk combination, not an integrated Internet program,
but it provides much of the same functionality
through a set of freeware and shareware Internet
programs that are among the best available. Along
with MacTCP and either MacPPP or InterSLIP for the
Internet connection, ISKM includes Internet Config,
Anarchie, Eudora, and MacWeb and a set of Anarchie
bookmarks to all the rest of the major Internet
programs available on the Internet. A version with a
second disk and paid-up shareware fees Is available
In software stores; it adds Finger, Talk, a fully
functional demo of NewsHopper, and utilities for
creating Web pages. At street prices ranging from
$16 to $30, ISKM is well worth the money for the
hundreds of pages of information in the book alone,
and the bundled software is an excellent bonus. Highly
recommended. But of course, I'm biased. :-)
Int<
Sta
srnet
rter
Tor MaHHHIHD
http : / /wv'/v/. mcp . com/ hayden/ iskm/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/select/
Microphone Pro
Microphone Pro doesn’t exactly provide integrated
Internet access, but it does provide many of the tools
you need for Internet access in a single package,
including the CommToolbox MP Telnet tool, for use
with Microphone itself along with other Communica-
tions Toolbox-aware programs. Then there’s MacSLIP
2.0, the Internet Mail and Internet News modules
that offer basic email and news, Fetch from
Dartmouth (which means that if you buy MIcroPhone
Pro, you do not have to pay the shareware fee for
Fetch), and TurboGopher from the University of
Minnesota. MIcroPhone Pro actually duplicates FTP,
since it now includes Snatcher, another decent FTP
client (see chapter 23, “FTP"). To be complete, I
should mention that it also includes a slightly older
version of the FaxSTF fax software, and Microphone’s
graphical environment for various commercial
services, called Loran. You can purchase MIcroPhone
Pro 2.0 by mail order for approximately $150, and if
you have questions or comments about it, you can
contact Software Ventures at
microphone@svcdudes.com, or call 510-644-3232;
510-848-0885 (fax).
http: //wvw. svcdudes.com/
Integrating and Differentiating
Perhaps the impression that I'd like you to take away from this chapter is that the Internet
is a vast and multi-faceted place. Although the integrated programs may offer some
advantages in terms of bringing together the common things you do on the Internet, the
Part IV
572 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
trade-offs and compromises often don't seem to me to be worthwhile. Perhaps it's less the
fault of the integrated programs than merely the comparison with a set of truly great
stand-alone programs that just happen to be freeware or shareware, programs like
Eudora, Anarchie, and NewsWatcher. However, remember that the main feature of a
MacTCP-based connection to the Internet is choice, and you're more than welcome to
choose one of these integrated programs as your base set of Internet applications. The
MacTCP-based connection doesn't limit you to that set, luckily, so you're able to mix
Netscape with VersaTerm-Link, Anarchie with TCP/ Connect II, or any other combina-
tion. Just make sure the end result fits your needs.
That said, for those of you who are feeling somewhat overwhelmed with all the possibili-
ties and the feature sets of the main programs that I recommend, let's move next to a
simple, step-by-step discussion of how to use these recommended applications.
Note
Step-by-Step Internet
By now, you've probably noticed that I tend to avoid giving detailed, blow-by-blow
directions for using Internet programs. You may be wondering why, since such specifics
are common in technical books. Don't worry, there is a method to my madness.
On the Internet, things change rapidly. Something that is available one day may disap-
pear the next. Or, in some cases, something may be available at random times during the
day, but not at others. Herein lies my concern with rigid instructions that people will
attempt to follow closely. What if I give instructions for performing some task and it
doesn't work? The fault may lie not with my instructions, but with the Internet resource I
explain — but that makes no difference to the person following the directions.
So, my strategy elsewhere in this book has been to provide basic information necessary^ to
use the common MacTCP programs in a variety of situations, hopefully giving you the
background you need to work around any difficulties you may encounter. However,
several of the responses I received to the first edition of the book indicated that some step-
by-step instruction would be welcome, and far be it from me to ignore such suggestions
from readers. After all. I'm writing the book for you, not for me.
You must have a direct connection or a PPP or SLIP account set up to be able to work
through the following instructions, although you're welcome to read through before you have
the connection set up.
Note
574 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Unlike any other book, I cover most of the Internet software available for the Mac, so
providing step-by-step instructions for every program in this book would fill thousands
of pages — and could be patented as a cure for insomnia. Instead, I provide the steps
necessary to perform several basic tasks in some of the most important applications. All of
these applications require MacTCP and either a network or a SLIP or PPP connection. I
start by covering MacTCP, MacPPP, and InterSLIP, provide steps for setting up the useful
Internet Config, and then give steps for using a few important applications.
In each case, I assume you have the program available on your hard disk. You may need to
copy it from a floppy disk or download it from the Internet, debinhex, and expand the file.
Most of these programs can be installed from the ISKM disk, and the ISKM Installer does
some of the work of placing and configuring the programs. So, some of these instructions
may be redundant. For instance, there's no reason to configure MacTCP for a provider on the
disk (such as Northwest Nexus), because the ISKM Installer does it for you. Nonetheless, I
wanted to be complete, and without instructions that start fivm a clean copy, you would
never be able to duplicate these configurations on your own.
For more information on what the ISKM Installer does for you, check out chapter 16,
"Internet Starter Kit Disk."
MacTCP 2.0.6
Quick Reminder: MacTCP is a control panel that makes it possible for Macs to connect to
TCP/IP-based networks such as the Internet.
Tasks:
1. Install MacTCP.
2. Configure MacTCP for use with your provider and MacPPP or for use with your
provider and InterSLIP.
Install MacTCP
1. Drop the icon for the MacTCP control panel on your System Folder icon.
The Mac asks whether you would like to put MacTCP in the Control Panels folder
(see figure 29.1).
2. Click the OK button to confirm that MacTCP should go in the Control Panels folder.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 575
A
Control panels need to be stored In the
Control Panels folder or they may not
u»ork properly. Pul “MacTCP" Into the
Control Panels folder?
( Cancel 3
Figure 29.1 Placing MacTCP.
Configure MacTCP
1. Jump ahead and install MacPPP or InterSLIP as set out in the ''Install MacPPP" and
"Install InterSLIP" sections that follow. (You must have MacPPP installed before
you can configure MacTCP for MacPPP; you must have InterSLIP installed before
you can configure MacTCP for InterSLIP).
2. Open the Control Panels folder and double-click the MacTCP icon.
The MacTCP window opens (see figure 29.2).
Figure 29.2 MacTCP control panel zoindoiv.
3. In the MacTCP window, select the PPP icon (or, if you use InterSLIP, select the
InterSLIP icon instead of the PPP icon).
4. Click the More button.
MacTCP presents you with its configuration dialog (see figure 29.3).
^ Step-by-Step
^ Internet
<
Note
576
luternct Starter Kit for Macintosh
— Obtain Address —
O Manually
^ Seruer
O Dynamically
Routing Information -
Gateinay Rddress:
[192 . ii5~r 9 1.253 |
[ Cancel ]
- IP Address; —
Classi m Address: 192.138.173.65
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Net I Subnet I Node
Bits: 24 Q 8
^ □ I. <K •<
Subnet: jq | □ | ^
Node: iis j □ I <i < k
Domain Name Server information:
Domain IP Address Default
1
±
||l98 137.2311
_l o
M,
||192.135.191 1
1 o
Figure 29,3 MacTCP configuration dialog.
These directions show you how to specifically configure MacTCP for Northwest Nexus; I'll
explain when you should use your provider's hifonrmtion instead.
5. In the Obtain Address area at the upper left of the configuration dialog, select
Server.
6. In the Domain Name Server Information area, click in the first field under the
Domain column. Type halcyon.com., making sure to include the trailing period.
Press Tab or click the first field under IP Address. Type 198.137.231.1 and select the
Default radio button. (Don't actually type this information unless your provider is
Northwest Nexus; type the information given to you by your Internet provider.)
7. Press Tab or click in the second field under Domain. Type a period. Press Tab or
click in the second field under IP Address. Type 198.137.231.1 again. (I won't remind
you again in this set of steps, but do remember, you must type the information from
your provider.)
8. Press Tab or click in the third field under Domain. Type a period. Press Tab or click
in the third field under IP Address. Type 192.135.191.1 this time.
9. Press Tab or click in the fourth field under Domain (you must scroll down to see it).
Type a period. Press Tab or click in the fourth field under IP Address. Type
192.135.191.3 this time.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-lnj-Step Internet 577
Your configuration dialog should now look similar to my screen shot, although yours
probably has 0.0. 0.0 in the Gateway Address field and something different in the IP
Address area at the upper right. Don't worry about those differences. If you don't use
Step-by-Slep
^ Internet
<
MaePPP 2.0.1
Quick Reminder: MaePPP consists of a control panel called Config PPP and an extension
called PPP. MaePPP uses your modem to establish a connection to a PPP account over
which MacTCP-based programs can work.
Tasks:
1. Install MaePPP.
2. Configure MaePPP for your provider.
3. Establish an Internet connection.
4. Close the Internet connection.
Install MaePPP
1. Select both the Config PPP and PPP icons and drop them on your System Folder
icon.
The Mac tells you that they need to be stored in special places within the System
Folder, and asks if you would like to put them where they belong (see figure 29.4).
Northwest Nexus as your provider, you have different domain name server information,
and you may have to select the Manually radio button instead of the Server radio button
if your provider gives you a Manually-addressed or static account (at which point you
also must enter your IP number in the MacTCP control panel window and the gateway
address in the Gateway Address field — both of these pieces of information come from
your provider).
10. Click the OK button to save your changes and close the configuration dialog.
11. Close the MacTCP window by clicking the close box in the upper left-hand corner.
MacTCP may or may not tell you that you must restart for your changes to take
effect.
12. Restart your Macintosh.
If you followed these directions without customizing them for InterSLIP or a different
provider, you've now configured MacTCP for use with MaePPP and Northwest Nexus.
578 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
These Items need to be stored in special
places inside the System Folder in order to
be auailable to the Macintosh. Put them
inhere they belony?
[ Cancel ) [( OK ]]
Figure 29 A Placing MacPPP.
2. Click the OK button to confirm that the Config PPP control panel should go in the
Control Panels folder and that the PPP extension should go in the Extensions folder.
The Mac then tells you where it has placed them.
Configure MacPPP
1. Open the Control Panels folder and double-click the Config PPP icon.
The Config PPP window appears (see figure 29.5).
Config PPP
[ Open
PPP ,
DOlUN Stats...
[ Soft Close ;
[ Hard Close i
Port Name: r^odem Port
Idle Timeout (minutes): [None
Echo Interuol (seconds): |Off ▼!
□ Terminal tUindoui
□ Hangup on Close
□ Quiet Mode
PPP Seruen lUntItled ▼!
[Config...] [ Nem... ] [Delete...]
V2.0.1
Figure 29,5 Config PPP zuindow.
2. Click the Config button to bring up the server configuration dialog (see figure 29.6).
Note Note
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 579
PPP Seruer Nome: [halcyon. com
Port Speed: 1 19200
Floiu Controh jCTS only
(i)ToneOiQl O Pulse Oial
Phone num
Modem Init
Modem connect timeout: [90 j seconds
[Connect Script...] [ LCP Options... ]
[Outhentlcatlon...] [ IPCP Options...]
[ Pone ]
455-0455
IvroTi
Figure 29.6 Configuring the server configuration dialog.
If the PPP Server pop-up menu doesn't have Untitled selected, you may wish to create a neio ^ internet
server definition by clicking the New button, typing a name in the dialog, and clicking the <
OK button.
These directions include specific information for Northwest Nexus, but if Northwest Nexus
is not your provider, use the information from your provider.
3. Click in the PPP Server Name field. Type halcyon.com (or whatever you want to call
it — it doesn't matter).
4. From the Port Speed pop-up menu, choose 19200 or — if you have a 28.8 Kbps
modem — choose 38400. If you aren't sure what kind of modem you have, 19200 is a
safe choice.
5. From the Flow Control pop-up menu, choose CTS only.
6. If you have touch-tone phone service, select Tone Dial. Otherwise, select Pulse Dial.
7. In the Phone Number field, type the phone number for your provider, just as I've
entered the phone number for Northwest Nexus, 1-206-455-8455. If you must use
any specific prefixes, such as 9, to dial out, add them here, such as: 9,1-206-455-8455.
Note Note
580 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
The comma in the phone number above tells the modem to pause for two seconds before
dialing the rest of the number. You can insert multiple commas to use additional two-second
pauses.
8. In the Modem Init field, enter AT&Fl if you use a SupraFAXModem or Global
Village TelePort or PowerPort modem. For other modems, check your modem
manual for the appropriate factory default init string. Make sure that string turns off
XON/XOFF flow control.
If you installed MacPPP using the ISKM Installer, look in the ISKM3 Folder on your hard
disk for a folder called MacPPP 2.0.1. In that folder you should find a text file called Modem
Strings. It contains a number of untested modem init strings that might work.
9. Click the Connect Script button to bring up the script login dialog (see figure 29.7).
Your provider may use a slightly different login script.
Ulalt timeout: |30 | seconds
(i)0ut OU^alt
OOut (i)lllalt
(i)0ut OlHoit
OOut ®lUolt
(i)0ut OUJalt
® Out OWqW
(i)0ut OUJait
(i)0ut OUJalt
[ Cancel ] [ OK ]
El
□
El
□
1 ^
□
□
□
ogin:
Ptidbits
ssuiord:
Figure 29.7 Configuring the login script.
10. In the first row of controls, select Out and check the <CR> checkbox to send a
carriage return.
11. In the second row of controls, select Wait and enter ogin: to wait for the login
prompt.
12. In the third row of controls, select Out and enter your userid. Check the checkbox so
MacPPP sends your userid and then a carriage return.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 581
13. In the fourth set of fields, select Wait and enter ssword: in tine field to wait for the
password prompt.
14. In the fifth set of fields, select Out and enter your password. Check the checkbox so
MacPPP sends your password followed by a carriage return. Ignore the rest of the
rows of controls.
15. Finally, click the OK button to save your changes.
16. Back in the server configuration dialog, click the Done button to save your server
configuration.
17. Back in the Config PPP window, click the close box in the upper left-hand corner to
close the PPP window.
Establish an Internet Connection
1. After you finish setting up MacTCP and MacPPP, you can use MacPPP to connect to ^ step-by-siep
the Internet. Open the Control Panels folder and double-click the Config PPP icon. ^ internet
The Config PPP control panel opens. Note the frowning faces and the PPP DOWN
label in the upper left corner (see figure 29.8).
Config PPP I
[ Open ] [ Soft Close ]
“^‘Sn [ Stats... ] [ Hard Close ]
Port Nome: Modem Port ▼
Idle Timeout (minutes): [None
Echo Interuol (seconds): |off
□ Terminal Ulindoui
^ Hangup on Close
^ Quiet Mode
PPP Seruen fhBlcgon.com"^
[Config...] [ Neui... ] [Delete...]
Figure 29.8 Disconnected.
2. Click the Open button.
MacPPP configures your modem according to the string you entered in the server
configuration dialog and dials the number you provided (see figure 29.9).
After the modems connect, MacPPP sends your userid and password to log you in
and then establishes the connection (see figure 29.10).
582 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MocPPP status:
Dialing modem...
I Quit )
Figure 29.9 MacPPP dialing dialog.
MacPPP status:
PPP Phase:
Establishment
( Quit 1
Figure 29.10 PPP Establishment phase.
Notice that the faces are smiling and the label now says PPP UP (see figure 29.11).
Figure 29.11 Connected.
You should now be able to run MacTCP-based applications such as Anarchie and
MacWeb.
Close the Internet Connection
1. Quit any MacTCP-based applications other than Eudora that you may have
launched.
2. If the Config PPP window is closed, open the Control Panels folder and double-click
the Config PPP icon.
Note
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 583
3. Click the Hard Close button.
MacPPP disconnects from the Internet and hangs up your modem.
Congratulations! You've successfully configured MacPPP, established a connection to the
Internet, and closed that connection. If anything went wrong during this process, reread
the section on MacPPP in chapter 18, "PPP," and chapter 20, "Troubleshooting Your
Connection."
InterSLIP 1.0.1
Quick Reminder: InterSLIP consists of an application called InterSLIP Setup and an
extension called InterSLIP (a control panel called InterSLIP Control is necessary only for
System 6 users). InterSLIP uses your modem to establish a connection to a SLIP account
over which MacTCP-based programs can work.
Tasks:
1. Install InterSLIP.
2. Configure InterSLIP for your provider.
3. Establish an Internet connection.
4. Close the Internet connection.
K Step-by-Step
^ Internet
If you install InterSLIP using the ISKM Installer, you do not need to folloio the directions
here for installing InterSLIP, These directions are for people ivho retrieve a fresh copy of
InterSLIP from a different source.
Install InterSLIP
1. Restart your Macintosh with extensions off. That is, restart your Mac while pressing
the Shift key. Keep the Shift key pressed down until you see a message telling you
that your extensions are off. The message should appear about a third of the way
into the startup process.
2. Double-click the InterSLIP Installer icon.
InterSLIP's installer launches and the About This Installer window appears.
3. Click the Continue button.
Another dialog appears (see figure 29.12).
584
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
InterSLIP
Click the "InstQir button to installer
InterSLIP software, On-line
documentation, and enample gateway
script.
For more options, click the "Custom*
button.
InrtAlUtion r*qu<rf s : 366K
[ Custom ]
Figure 29.12 Installing InterSLIP.
4. Click the Install button at the lower right.
A dialog appears, reminding you that you will need to restart your Mac after the
installation finishes.
5. Click the Yes button.
You'll see a dialog giving messages about the installation's progress, and then you'll
get a message asking you to restart your Macintosh.
6. Click the Restart button.
Your Macintosh restarts with the different parts of InterSLIP installed in the correct
folders.
Configure InterSLIP
1. Locate InterSLIP Setup. If you installed InterSLIP from the Starter Kit disk, look in
the ISKM3 Folder, in the InterSLIP folder. If you installed InterSLIP from the
InterSLIP Installer, look in your Apple menu.
2. Double-click the InterSLIP Setup icon or choose InterSLIP Setup from the Apple
menu.
The InterSLIP window appears (see figure 29.13).
3. From the File menu, choose New.
A dialog appears (see figure 29.14).
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 585
Figure 29.13 InterSLlP setup.
Nome of neui Configuration:
|My Prouider Configuration |
[ Cancel D
§ IntBiSUP < O'
Figure 29.14 Naming your configuration.
g Step-by-Step
i Internet
<
4. In the dialog, enter a name for your new configuration. You might give it the name
of your provider. Click the OK button when you finish.
The InterSLlP window should now list the name of the configuration you created.
5. Double-click the name of your new configuration.
InterSLlP brings up a configuration dialog for the configuration you just double-
clicked (see figure 29.15).
Note
586
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
j My Proulder Configuration
S#ri*l Port: I ModomPort
Baud Rato: I 1 9200 ▼ \
Data Bits: I B ^ |
StopBll*: I 1 ▼ i
Partty: | Nona ^“1
[S Hardvart Handshaking
13 Spaakar on vhrta dialing
Dial Script: | Hauas0*Compat(bW j
Dial: I Tona
PhonaNo.; [455-9485 1
Modfin Init: |at&F 1 j
Oatawag; I Slmpla UNIH/TaUbIt
Uiarnama: jtidbtts j
(~~| Prompt for pasrword at oonnaot tima
Password: jaaaaaa j
IP Addrass: j ~|
Namastrvtr: j j
^ Rf C 1 1 44 TCP Htadar Comprassion
MTUSiia; |l006 j
[ Cancel ] f[ OK ^
Figure 29.15 Configuring InterSLIP.
These directions include specific information for Northwest Nexus, but if Northwest Nexus
is not your provider and your provider gives you different information, you must use the
information from your provider— just follow along and msert the information from your
provider in the appropriate places.
6. From the Serial Port pop-up menu, choose Modem Port.
7. From the Baud Rate pop-up menu, choose 19200, unless you have a 28.8 Kbps
modem. If you have a 28.8 Kbps modem, choose 38400. If you aren't sure what kind
of modem you have, 19200 is a safe choice.
8. From the Data Bits pop-up menu, choose 8.
9. From the Stop Bits pop-up menu, choose 1.
10. From the Parity pop-up menu, choose None.
11. Turn on the Hardware Handshaking checkbox.
12. Turn on the Speaker on while dialing checkbox.
13. From the Dial Script pop-up menu, choose Hayes-Compatible Modem.
14. From the Dial pop-up menu, choose Tone (or, if you have pulse service, choose
Pulse).
15. In the Phone No. field, type the phone number you use to call your provider. If you
must use any specific prefixes, such as 9, to dial out, add them here: 9,1-206-455-
8455.
Note
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 587
The comma in the phone number tells the modem to pause for hoo seconds before dialing the
rest of the number. You can insert multiple commas to use additional tzoo-second pauses.
16. In the Modem Init field, enter AT&Fl if you use a SupraFAXModem or Global
Village TelePort or PowerPort modem. For other modem types, check your modem
manual for the appropriate factory default string. Make sure that string turns off
XON/XOFF flow control.
17. From the Gateway pop-up menu, choose Simple UNIX /Telebit. Your provider may
give you a different gateway script that, when properly installed in the Gateway
Scripts folder, also shows in the Gateway pop-up menu.
18. In the User name field, enter your username, making sure to enter it exactly as your
provider gave it to you, probably in all lowercase.
19. Turn off the Prompt for password at connect time checkbox and enter your pass-
word into the Password field.
20. Leave the IP Address field blank.
21. In the Nameserver field, enter your name server (get this information from your
provider).
22. Turn on the RFC 1144 TCP Header Compression checkbox.
23. In the MTU Size field, enter 1006.
24. When you're finished, check your dialog carefully to make sure it is filled out
correctly and that everything matches the instructions here and the information
from your provider. When you are ready, click the OK button.
Establish an Internet Connection
1. If the InterSLIP window is not open, launch InterSLIP Setup.
2. Click the Connect button.
InterSLIP Setup dials the modem and sends your username and password. Eventu-
ally, the status message in the upper right should say <Connected> (see figure
29.16).
•-a
Step-by-Slcp
2; inlernol
588
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 29.16 Connected,
You should now be able to run MacTCP-based applications such as Anarchie and
MacWeb.
Close the Internet Connection
1. Quit any MacTCP-based applications other than Eudora that are running.
2. If it's not already open, open the InterSLIP window.
3. Click the Disconnect button.
InterSLIP disconnects from the Internet and hangs up your modem.
Congratulations! You've successfully installed and configured InterSLIP, established a
connection to the Internet, and closed that connection. If anything went wrong during this
process, reread the sections about InterSLIP and troubleshooting in chapter 19, "SLIP,"
and chapter 20, "Troubleshooting Your Connection."
Internet Config
Quick Reminder: Internet Config is a program that helps you configure MacTCP applica-
tions. You enter configuration information in Internet Config once, and then any MacTCP
application that knows about Internet Config automatically uses the information in
Internet Config. Of the programs mentioned in this chapter, Internet Config works with
NewsWatcher, and Anarchie.
Tasks:
1. Configure Internet Config.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 589
Configure Internet Config
1. Double-click the Internet Config icon.
Internet Config launches. If this is the first time you have launched Internet Config,
it prompts you to install the Internet Config extension. Click the OK button to in-
stall it.
Next, Internet Config shows the Internet Preferences window (see figure 29.17). If
for some reason you don't see the Internet Preferences window, choose Open
Internet Preferences from the File menu.
Figure 29.17 Internet Preferences window,
2. In the Internet Preferences window, click the Personal tile.
The Personal window opens (see figure 29.18).
a
Step-by-Step
Internet
Figure 29.18 Setting personal preferences.
3. In the Personal window, fill in your name and organization. Leave the > character in
the Quote String field. When you finish, click the close box at the upper left of the
window.
Note Note
590 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
For more help with any Internet Config dialog, turn on balloon help (from the Help menu at
the upper right of the menu bar) and point at the item you want help with.
4. Back in the Internet Preferences dialog, click the Email tile.
The Email window opens (see figure 29.19).
Figure 29.19 Setting email preferences.
5. Fill in the Email Address field with the email address given to you by your provider.
Be careful to use all lowercase.
6. Press Tab or click in the Mail Account field. Type your mail account, using informa-
tion your provider gave you. If you have a POP account, use your POP account in
the Mail Account field. Be certain to use all lowercase unless your provider explicitly
gave you a mixed-case username.
7. Press Tab or click in the Mail Password field. Enter your password, being careful to
enter it exactly as your provider gave it to you.
8. Press Tab or click in the SMTP Host field. Type your SMTP host, using the name
your provider gave you. (If your provider gave you information about an SMTP
server, note that an SMTP server is the same thing as an SMTP host.)
Figure 29.19 shows my information, and yours is definitely different. Also, some providers
provide different passwords for different things; be sure to put your email password in the
Mail Password field.
9. When you finish filling in the first four fields in the Email window, click the close
box at the upper left of the window.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 591
10. You should be back at the Internet Preferences window. Click the News tile.
As you probably expect, the News window opens (see figure 29.20).
Figure 29.20 Setting news preferences.
11. In the News window, fill in the NNTP Host field using information from your
provider. If your provider is Northwest Nexus, enter news . halcyon . com, as I did in 2
figure 29.20. 2
<
12. Press Tab or click in the News Username field. Enter your news username, which is
usually the same as your email username.
13. Press Tab or click in the News Password field. Enter your news password, which is
probably the same as your email password.
14. Click the close box at the upper left of the window.
15. From the File menu, choose Save.
A Save dialog box appears, and it shows that if you click the Save button, you will
save a file called Internet Preferences in your Preferences folder.
16. Do not change the default name or folder. Do click the Save button.
17. From the File menu, choose Quit.
You have finished the basics of setting up Internet Config. When you launched Internet
Config back in step one, the program installed an Internet Config extension and an
Internet Preferences file. You can also customize the settings in the remaining Internet
Config tiles, but it's not necessary at this time.
Eudora 1.5.1
Step-by-Step
Internet
Quick Reminder: Eudora is an email client program. Although it can work with both a
shell account and a UUCP transport agent, it is most commonly used with MacTCP, and
that's how we configure it here.
592 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Tasks:
1. Launch and configure Eudora.
2. Compose and send an email message to President Clinton.
3. Subscribe to the TidBlTS mailing list.
4. Read, reply to, and delete an email message.
Launch and Configure Eudora
1. Double-click the Eudora icon.
Eudora launches.
2. From the Special menu, choose Settings.
Eudora presents you with the Settings dialog. Notice that the dialog has icons
running down the left side, and clicking an icon brings up controls for that icon's
options (see figure 29.21).
Figure 29,21 Getting started in the Eudora Settings dialog,
3. If you keep the Getting Started icon selected, you should see the settings for Getting
Started, as shown in figure 29.21. In the POP Account field, enter your POP account
(get this information from your provider) and be certain to enter it in exactly the
same case as your provider used, usually lowercase.
4. Press Tab or click in the Real Name field. Enter your real name as you would like it
to appear in your email messages.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 593
5. In the Connection Method area, turn on the MacTCP radio button.
You have now completed filling in the Getting Started portion of the Eudora Set-
tings dialog. We are going to skip the Personal Information option and move on to
the Hosts settings.
6. Click the Hosts icon.
The Settings dialog shows the controls for Hosts (see figure 29.22)
[ Settings j
Hojta
POP Account:
SMTP r
pp. [;
Finger: F
Q DKSIoed betenclng.
[ Cancel ] [ DK ]
•-a
^ Step-by*Step
^ Internet
Figure 29.22 Setting Hosts options.
7. The only field you need to worry about in Hosts is the SMTP field. If your provider
explicitly gave you an SMTP server (or host) that is different from the machine name
in your POP account, enter its name in the SMTP field. Otherwise, leave the field
blank, as I've done in figure 29.22.
That's it for the Hosts controls. Let's move on to the Sending Mail controls.
8. Click the Sending Mail icon (you may need to scroll down to see it).
The Sending Mail controls appear (see figure 29.23).
9. Turn off the Immediate send checkbox. This ensures that you can compose mail and
queue it for sending without being connected to the Internet the entire time.
10. Make sure the Send on check checkbox is turned on. This ensures that Eudora sends
waiting mail when it checks for new mail.
11. Click the OK button.
594
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
[ Setting! i
Sending Meil
Return Address:
SMTP Server:
□ Immedleteeend.
^ Send on check.
[3 Word vrep.
[3 Fix curl V quotes.
El Meg use Quoted- Printeble.
□ Keep copies of outgoing mail.
El stgneture.
Q
[ Concel ] I OK j|
Figure 29.23 Setting Sending Mail options.
You have now performed the minimum configuration to use Eudora. There are many
other options in the Settings dialog that you may wish to explore further. I recommend
that you turn on Balloon Help from the Help menu (at the upper right of the menu bar)
and point at any fields or checkboxes with which you need help.
Compose and Send an Email Message
to President Clinton
1. Make sure Eudora is running. From the Message menu, choose New Message.
Eudora presents you with a new message window, with the From line filled in with
your email address and name (see figure 29.24).
2. Make sure your insertion point is in the To line (it should be unless you've clicked
elsewhere in the window) and type your recipient's email address. In this case, enter
president@whitehouse.gov.
3. Press Tab or click in the Subject line to move the insertion point to the Subject field.
Enter your subject, something like Communicating with the President.
4. Click in the large area of the window for typing the body of your message, or press
Tab three times to move the insertion point. Type your message.
Since this example sends email to an address that replies automatically, the body of
the message isn't that important for the time being, although you can use this
method to express your opinions to President Clinton. At minimum, type something
like I strongly support the concept of a National Information Infrastructure. It's
considered polite to sign your name at the bottom.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 595
presidentviuhitehouse.gou. Communicating luith the President
□ m ✓PP il ✓-H Q] 1 Ouaue
To t pros 1 dantQwh 1 tahousa . gou
Froa: tidbl tsShalcyon.coti <Rdaa C. Engst)
Subjact; ComunI eating with tha Prasldant
Cc:
Bcc;
Rttachtiants:
la
1 strongly support the concept of a Rational Inforaation InfrastrucHr^.
cheers . -fldan
Figure 29.24 Sending email to the President.
5. When you finish typing and signing your message, click the Queue button in the
upper right corner of the window. (If that button is labeled Send, choose Settings
from the Special menu, scroll down to select the Sending Mail icon, turn off the
Immediate send checkbox, and click the OK button. The Send button should turn
into a Queue button.)
6. Now connect to the Internet, using MacPPP or InterSLIP if necessary. Do not quit
Eudora; simply switch out to the Finder to launch InterSLIP Setup or open Config
PPP to connect.
7. Switch back to Eudora, if necessary.
8. From the File menu, choose Check Mail.
Eudora immediately presents you with a dialog asking for your password. Enter it,
making sure to capitalize it as you did when you originally created it (or as it was
given to you). The characters will not be displayed.
9. Click OK to enter the password you just typed.
Eudora then contacts your POP server and looks for new mail, transferring it back to
your Macintosh if you have any. After retrieving new mail, Eudora contacts the
SMTP server and sends the mail that you just queued for delivery. After it finishes
sending, Eudora displays a dialog telling you whether or not you have new mail.
10. If you're paying for your Internet connection by the hour, or if you're paying for a
long-distance call, switch to Config PPP or InterSLIP Setup and disconnect to save
money. Otherwise, go ahead and stay connected as we work through the next few
tasks.
gj Step-by-Step
i Internet
<
Assuming everything was set up correctly on your Macintosh and on your host machine,
you've just sent an email message via Eudora.
596 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Subscribe to the TidBITS Mailing List
1. Make sure Eudora is open, and from the Message menu choose New Message.
Eudora presents you with a new message window, with the From line filled in with
your email address and name and with the insertion point in the To line.
2. In the To line, type listserv@ricevml.rice.edu.
3. Press Tab four times or click in the message section of the window. Type SUB-
SCRIBE TIDBITS your full name (replace your full name with your real name, not
your email address) and nothing else (see figure 29.25).
Ilstseru9rlceum1.rlce.edu, «No Subjects
1 ||»nt| ✓ QP B0
□1
[ Queue ]
To: llstsarvOrlcasml .rica.adu
From: tridbl tsdhalcuon.con (Rd«m C. Engst)
Sub J act:
Cc:
Bcc:
Rttachnents:
i
"I
SUBSCRIBE TIDBITS fldaa C. Engst
.l!ll
±
a
Figure 29.25 Subscribing to TidBITS.
4. Click the Queue button in the upper right of the window to queue the message to be
sent.
5. Make sure you are connected to the Internet.
6. From the File menu, choose Check Mail.
7. As before, Eudora first connects to your POP server and checks for new mail.
Depending on how long it has taken you to create this message, you may have
received mail back from the White House (if you sent a message in the previous set
of steps). Either way, after checking for new mail, Eudora contacts your SMTP
server and sends your subscription message to the LISTSERV program.
8. If you are paying for your connection, feel free to close the connection now to save
money.
YouVe just subscribed to a mailing list! Although other mailing lists may be slightly
different, mostly in terms of the mailing list manager's address and the list name, the
basics are the same.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 597
Read, Reply to, and Delete an Email Message
1. Make sure Eudora is running.
If you received a reply from the White House when you sent the subscription
message to the TidBITS list, Eudora automatically opened your In box for you.
If you have not yet received the reply from the White House or the confirmation of
your subscription to the TidBITS list, wait for a while (there's no way to know how
long it could take, although when I wrote these instructions, the responses came
back within minutes).
2. Make sure you're connected to the Internet, and from the File menu choose Check
Mail.
3. Eudora opens your In box after receiving new mail; if you have closed it while
waiting, go to the Mailbox menu and choose In. Eudora then displays the In box and
marks unread messages with a bullet (•) character (see figure 29.26).
■ D e>r.K. -f!!!r! P**. _? J 9 1
,11:20
PM 6/14/!^ J
2|
Irrb. (»:•!* - 1
•^|autor«*pond«r£^
AM ei/ is/i^n
"r
!R«; Connunicallng uiith th« President 1
m
j.j ...8®.
I 4:22
hri 5/15/9_i
2
^Output of uour Job ’'tidbits"
■ -J
109/536K/72K
fit
Figure 29.26 Eudora In box.
4. Double-click the reply from the White House, which probably looks as though it
came from autoresponder@WhlteHouse.Gov, which is the program that automati-
cally replies to email sent to President Clinton.
Eudora opens the message and displays it, along with the first four lines of the
header (see figure 29.27).
iEIl autoresponder®lUhlt, 12:09 RM 4/23/95 -,Re: Message to the presi BfSi
1 1 Subject: Re: Messege to the president
Oete: Sun. 23 Apr 95 BO; 89; 44 -0400
From ; eu toresponderOWh 1 teHouse . Oov
s
Subject: Re: Messege to the president
To: tidbi tsShalcgon.coo (Aden C. Engst)
Thank you for writing to President Clinton ula electronic
mall. Since June 1993. uh 1 tehousa . gou has received over 475.000
—
messages from people all across the country and the world.
o
Figure 29.27 Email from the White House.
5. Read the message, scrolling with the scroll bar or the Page Up and Page Down keys.
598 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
6, After reading the message, go to the Message menu and choose Reply.
Eudora creates a new message window, entering the original sender's address in the
To line and the subject of your original message, prefixed with Re:, in the Subject
line. The entire body of the original message is quoted in the body of the message,
and Eudora automatically selects the quoted text (see figure 29.28). You can edit this
text or delete it entirely by pressing the Delete key.
QUtoresponder@lUhiteliQuse.Gou, Re: Message to the president
□ HjH ✓QP i| Q] ✓JH 1 Oueue 1
To: autoresponderawhi teHousa.Ooy
Fron: tidbl tsfihalcgon.con) (Rdam C. Engst)
Subjact: Re: Message to the president
Cc;
Bcc:
Rttacheents:
£
i'i
t
a
uiSTiTecil^Tc —
S)hc* itune i.^! teitouet.goM has rainoi\wd over 475^000
frtM pecsple aU the ebuntrg and the world.
>
Figure 2928 Replying to a message.
7. When your reply is ready, you could click the Queue button to queue it for delivery
again, but please don't, unless you really want to send mail to the President again.
When replying to personal email, you would queue the message, and then — when
you wanted to send the message, perhaps along with other queued messages — ^you
would choose either Check Mail or Send Queued Messages from the File menu.
8. Once you finish sending any messages, disconnect from the Internet, especially if
you're being charged.
9. To delete the message from the White House, make sure its window is open or make
sure it is selected in the In box; then, from the Message menu choose Delete.
Eudora moves the deleted message to the Trash mailbox.
That's about all you need to know to get started reading and writing email with Eudora.
As you explore the program or read about Eudora in chapter 21, "Email," you will find
many other options and shortcuts to make using Eudora even easier.
News Watcher 2.0b24
Quick Reminder: NewsWatcher is a newsreader, a client program for Usenet news.
NewsWatcher requires access to an NNTP news server on an Internet host.
Note
Chapter 29 ♦ Slep-by-Step Internet 599
Unfortunately, we were unable to include NewsWatcher on the ISKM disk for space reasons.
The directions later in this chapter for Anarchic give specific steps for using Anarchic to
download a copy of NewsWatcher.
Tasks:
1. Launch and configure NewsWatcher.
2. Create a personalized subscription list and subscribe to several newsgroups.
3. Read articles in a subscribed newsgroup.
4. Post an article.
Launch and Configure NewsWatcher
1. Make sure you are connected to the Internet — connect with MacPPP or InterSLIP if
necessary.
2. Double-click the NewsWatcher icon.
If you haven't previously configured NewsWatcher, the program launches and
presents a Welcome to NewsWatcher dialog (see figure 29.29).
UJelcome to NeuisUJQtcher
UJelcome to NeuislUatcherl Hie need to get some Information
from you before you use the program for the first time.
Horn do you plan to use NeujsUJotcher?
Click the “Priuate" button if you ore using a priuote Mac.
Click the “Shored” button If you ore using a shored Mac.
Click the “Lab” button If you ore using a lab Mac.
[ Quit ] [ Lab ] [ Shored ] [Priuate ]
Figure 29.29 Choosing how you use NeivsWatcher.
3. Click the Private button.
The Server Addresses dialog appears. If you configured Internet Config, the fields
will already be filled in (see figure 29.30).
^ Step-by-Step
^ Internet
<
600
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
^ Seruer Rddresses !
Please enter the addresses of your neujs and mail seruers.
You may enter either domain names (“host.sub.domoln") or IP
addresses 0*128.1.2.3"). Domain names are preferred. Get this
Information from your netujork administrator.
Neujs Seruer: | nems.halcyon.com |
Moil Seruer: | mail.halcyon.com |
[ Cancel ] t il
Figure 29.30 Configuring NewsWatcher.
4. If they are not already filled in, fill in the News Server and Mail Server fields using
information that you have obtained from your provider.
5. Click the OK button.
The Personal Information dialog appears.
6. Enter correct information in the Full name, Organization, and Email address fields.
Be certain to type your email address with all lowercase letters.
7. Click the OK button.
NewsWatcher connects to your news server and retrieves the full group list from the
server. This can take some time, especially over a slow modem. Once NewsWatcher
sorts the list, it displays it in a scrollable window, along with a smaller window
labeled untitled.
Do not quit NewsWatcher now, but go on to the next task in which you learn how to
create a personalized subscription list and subscribe to newsgroups that might interest
you.
You've now successfully completed the minimum steps necessary to configure and use
NewsWatcher. I strongly recommend that you read my discussion of NewsWatcher in
chapter 22, "Usenet News," and the user documentation that comes with NewsWatcher.
Most of the additional configuration options live in the Preferences dialog, which is
available from the File menu (see figure 29.31).
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Slep Internet 601
NeiiislUatcher Preferences i
— Topic: I Neujsreading Options
^ Shoui authors
□ Shorn article headers
^ Collapse threads
□ Main keyboard shortcuts
□ Keypad shortcuts
□ Reuse article ujlndoujs
(S Return to subject uilndoui at end of thread
[S Beep at end of group
MoHimum number of articles to fetch:
[ Cancel ] [[ OK
Figure 29.31 hJeiosWatcher Preferences dialog.
Create a Personalized Subscription List and Subscribe
to Several Newsgroups
1. Arrange the untitled and Full Group List windows so they don't overlap.
2. Making sure that untitled is the frontmost window, go to the File menu and choose
Save. Give the file an appropriate name, such as My Newsgroups, and save it in a
location where you will be able to easily find it later.
The window, also known as the subscription window, takes on the name that you
gave it.
You may wish to move the file later, perhaps to your Apple Menu Items folder so
that it shows up in your Apple menu.
3. Scroll down in the Full Group List window until you find the newsgroup called
news . announce . newusers. Groups are sorted alphabetically, so it should be about
halfway down.
4. Drag the news . announce . newusers item over to the subscription window and drop
it in the window.
NewsWatcher may show the spinning beach ball cursor briefly, and
news . announce . newusers should appear in your subscription window. The num-
ber next to its name indicates the number of unread articles in that group.
5. Repeat the process with comp . sy s . mac . announce, comp . sys . mac . comm, and
misc . test. As you drag each name over the subscription window, you should see a
SJ Step-by-Step
2; Intemol
<
602 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
dark black line appear in the window, indicating where the newsgroup will appear
once you drop it. For some fun, you might also drag over rec . humor . funny. You
can also add any other groups that you think might be interesting. When you finish,
your subscription window should resemble the one in figure 29.32.
My Neiusyroups
9 groups
49 ne«s. announce, navusars
5033 conp.sys.nae.cofM
14 coaip.syt.KJC.announca
0 rac. humor. funny
4750 ml sc. last
K
a
Figure 29.32 NeiusWatcher subscription window.
Announcements important to the entire Mac community appear in
comp. sys. mac. announce. Discussions about Macintosh communications software
appear in comp . sys . mac . comm, which is also a good place to ask about things that
you cannot otherwise figure out. I use misc. test later, when providing instructions
on posting.
6. Make sure your subscription window is frontmost, and choose Save from the File
menu to save your subscription list.
7. Close the Full Group List window by clicking the close box at its upper left. (You can
open it again by choosing Show Full Group List from the Windows menu.)
8. Quit NewsWatcher by choosing Quit from the File menu.
The previous isn't absolutely necessary, but bear with me. I want you to start the
next task, reading articles, as you would normally, and that includes launching
NewsWatcher.
You've now successfully created a personalized subscription list and saved it for future
use. You can add newsgroups to this list at any time and remove newsgroups that no
longer interest you (to remove a newsgroup, select it in the subscription window and then
choose Unsubscribe from the Special menu). NewsWatcher starts up slightly faster with a
small subscription list, so it works best to only subscribe to newsgroups that you read.
Read Articles in a Subscribed Newsgroup
1. If you are not connected to the Internet, establish a connection.
2. Launch NewsWatcher, not by double-clicking the NewsWatcher icon, but by
double-clicking the subscription list icon that you created in the previous task.
NewsWatcher launches, connects to the news server, checks for new groups and
new articles, and then displays your subscription list window.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 603
3. Double-click news . announce . newusers.
NewsWatcher retrieves the subjects and authors of the articles contained in that
newsgroup and presents you with a window displaying a list of those articles (see
figure 29.33).
neuis.onnounce.neuiusers I
21 artlcltts, 21 unr«ad
narK Morass ly Postnsws Rnsosrs Vour Qusstions on Msliqustts
Mork Moross Inlroduclion to n««rs . announcs
Dove Taylor R Gulds lo Social Nsvsgroups and Hailing Lists
Hark Horass Usenal Soflvars: History and Sourcss
Dauld.li.Urlqhtg.^ DRRFT FRQ: Ouldal Inss on Usenat Msmsgroup Hamss
Figure 29.33 Articles in news . announce . newusers.
4. Double-click the first article in the newsgroup.
Since articles in news . announce . newusers are often relatively large, it may take a
minute or so to download if you're using a modem. NewsWatcher displays the
article once it is downloaded.
^ Step-by-Step
^ Internet
5. Read the article, if you wish. I recommend that you browse the articles in this group
early on, since they're designed to answer many questions that new users have.
6. To read the next article, you can close the article window and double-click the next
article in the newsgroup. An easier method is to go to the News menu and choose
Next Article or to press K-I.
You've now successfully opened a newsgroup and read several articles. You can close the
window listing articles in news. announce. newusers, and double-click
comp . sys . mac . announce to see the list of articles in that group and read them if you
wish.
Post an Article
1. In your subscription window, double-click the misc . test newsgroup. You could
double-click any newsgroup that you wanted to post to, but since this is your first
attempt at posting from NewsWatcher, we'll try a newsgroup specially for tests. You
will receive a number of email messages from various sites, letting you know that
your test posting made it there.
The misc. test window opens.
2. From the News menu, choose New Message.
NewsWatcher brings up the New Message window with the Newsgroups line
already filled in and the insertion point in the Subject line (see figure 29.34).
604
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 29.34
3. Type a subject in the Subject line.
4. Press Tab or click in the message area. Then, type your article.
5. Click the Send button.
NewsWatcher posts your article to misc .test. Now that you've posted your article,
feel free to read other articles, post more articles (but remember, it's a good idea to
lurk for a while before becoming a prolific poster), and subscribe to additional
newsgroups. You won't see your post in misc .test unless you quit NewsWatcher
and relaunch it.
6. When you're finished, choose Quit from the File menu and save your subscription
list when NewsWatcher prompts you to do so.
NewsWatcher nezv message window.
Congratulations! You've successfully performed all the basic tasks you do with
NewsWatcher. I won't pretend that there aren't many more subtleties in using this
program, but you can learn about those from reading chapter 22, "Usenet News," and
NewsWatcher's documentation files.
Anarchie 1.5
Quick Reminder: Anarchie is a shareware FTP and Archie client program that you use to
search for and retrieve files available via anonymous FTP. Currently, the FTP function is
substantially more useful (lately, using Archie to search for files has not worked well,
though this is no fault of Anarchie's), so these steps focus on using Anarchie for FTP.
Tasks:
1. Launch and configure Anarchie.
2. Connect to a site and retrieve a file.
3. Use a bookmark to retrieve a file.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 605
Launch and Configure Anarchie
1. Anarchie uses Internet Config for its basic configuration, so if you haven't already
gone through the steps earlier in this chapter for setting up Internet Config, go back
and follow them. If for some reason you don't know all the information required by
those steps, the minimum that you must do in Internet Config in order to use
Anarchie is use the Email tile to open the Email dialog, where you must fill in the
Email Address field.
2. Anarchie's job, of course, is to download files, but because Anarchie also tries to be a
fairly helpful application, it passes downloaded files off to other programs, most
notably Stuffit Expander, for post-processing — making the files proper,
uncompressed Macintosh files. As a result, if you don't have a copy of Stuffit
Expander on your hard disk, install Stuffit Expander using the ISKM Installer before
you continue.
3. Double-click the Anarchie icon.
Anarchie launches. 3 .
^ Internet
<
That's it. You're done configuring and launching Anarchie and ready to use Anarchie to
connect to a site and retrieve a file.
Connect to a Site and Retrieve a File
1. Make sure that you are connected to the Internet and that Anarchie is running.
2. From the FTP menu, choose Get.
Anarchie brings up the Get via FTP window (see figure 29.35).
Get ulB FTP I
Machine: | ftp.tldblts.com
Path: |/pub/tldbits/select/nemsioatchBr.hqH~
Username:
Passuiord: |
O bet Listing
® Get File
OUieui File
O IndeH Search
(Username and Passiuord blank for anonymous FTP)
[ Cancel ]
[ Saue
Figure 29.35 Anarchie Get via FTP window.
3. In the Machine field, enter ftp.tidbits.com.
606 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
4. In the Path field, enter /pub/tidbits/select/newswatcher.hqx.
5; Select the Get File radio button.
6. Click the Get button to retrieve the file.
Anarchie displays a progress window as it downloads the file (see figure 29.36).
When the download is complete, Anarchie passes the file to Stuffit Expander for
post-processing. Stuffit Expander debinhexes and expands the file, thus turning it
into a NewsWatcher folder, which will appear on your desktop unless you've used
Internet Config to change the location of your download folder. (You change the
download folder using the File Transfer tile.)
! neujsujotcher.hqH
H«ehfai«: ftp.tidbits.Mm
Status: Ottting
State: Transferring
Transfarrad : 60006
Bytas/Sao: 6000 Tima LaM: t :50
200 PORT command suocassfiil.
= - ,
Figure 29.36 Anarchie progress window.
Use a Bookmark to Retrieve a File
1. Make sure Anarchie is running and that you are connected to the Internet.
2. If the Bookmarks window is not showing, choose List Bookmarks from the File
menu (see figure 29.37).
BookmDrks S
■ Trrr^T
Name
Siia Date Zona Macbint
Path
C] Darlnwuih CotVga
- - i ftp.dartmouth adu
pub/
□ Disinfactant
- - 1 ftp.Bcnsjivu.edu
pub/disinfaetant/
D DyUn
- - 1 ftp.cambrid 9 a.apple. 00 m
pub/dylan/
u
D Electronic Frontiar Foundation
- - 1 ftp.aff. 0 r 9
pub/
i
D Eudora
> > 1 ftpjp^aicommxom
quest /mao /eudora/
1 Q FAOs (France) - - S grasp! omir-ly on 1 fr
Di
\m
Figure 29.37 Anarchie Bookmarks window.
3. Double-click the Disinfectant item in the Name column (you may have to scroll
down to see it).
Anarchie connects to ftp.acns.nwu.edu and puts you in the / pub /disinfectant
directory (see figure 29.38).
Chapter 29 4 Step-bx/Step Internet 607
■■ ~ • y-' 1 1 ■ j 1 1 ‘ dlslnfoctont i
rkwt Size Dote Zone Hocnine Path
D announc«aent-3&. txl 2k4/l4/Q3 1 f Ip. ocns.nuu edu /pii> /disinf ectont/annocnceAen 1-36. txt
j dislnfectant36 sea. hqx 233k 4/7/9S 1 ftp.ocns.neu.edu /pct>/dislnfectant/dlsinfectanl36 sea. hqx
J REflOrE lk4/t4/93 1 ftp.ocns.neu.edu /pub/disInfectcnt/fCnOfC
j sonp Ie24. sea. hqx 386k 0/27/04 1 ftp.ocns.neu.edu /pub/disinfectant/s<»ple24. sea. hqx
c
7%
^
a
Figure 29.38 Anarchic at ftp.acns.nwu.edu,
4. Double-click the disinf ectant36 . sea . hqx item. (The name may not exactly match,
since Disinfectant may be at a later version when you try these steps.)
Anarchie downloads Disinfectant. When the download is complete, Anarchie passes
the file to Stuffit Expander. Stuffit Expander debinhexes and expands the file, thus
turning it into a Disinfectant icon, which will appear on your desktop unless you've
used Internet Config to change the location of your download folder.
Congratulations! You've just performed all the basic tasks in Anarchie you're likel^ to do ^ step-byStep
in real life. Extrapolate from these instructions to retrieve other files using Anarchie's ^ internet
Bookmarks and Get via FTP dialog.
MacWeb 1.00A3.2
Quick Reminder: MacWeb is a client application for the World Wide Web, the most
graphical and flexible of the Internet services.
Tasks:
1. Launch and configure MacWeb.
2. Browse the Web.
3. Visit a specific web site.
4. Use the hotlist.
Launch and Configure MacWeb
1. Make sure you are connected to the Internet — connect with MacPPP or InterSLIP, if
necessary.
2. Double-click the MacWeb icon.
MacWeb launches and loads its default home page. Figure 29.39 shows what the
MacWeb default home page will look like if you use installed MacWeb using the
608
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
ISKM Installer. Don't worry if yours looks different, though you should see the same
buttons across the top.
PI.
Internet Starter Kit for Mocintosti Internet Resources :
mm
ypL : //»•« • »cp . coa /hoyden/ 1 *k»7~
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh internet Resources
This page Is Intended as a concise collection of starting points to exploring the Internet
and World Wide Web resoirces. With the Internet's rate of change forever accelerating,
this page cannot atten^ to be comprehensive or even Yi^ll*rounded. With luck, hovrever.
It should allowyou to find the resources and Information that are Important to >w/foucan
also find out more about the books I've authored or co-authored,
published by Havden Books .
ISKM Macintosh Internet Software Updates
WWW Catalogs Directories
Internet Information Services
SQiavare-Afy hlY.e§.^.Flle. S
S.e.lMteiLWgi:Jd. Wl de. W^b.
BUlEair^
Figure 29.39 MacWeb welcome page.
3. From the File menu, choose Preferences.
MacWeb brings up the Preferences dialog and displays its General options.
4. Type your email address in the Email Address field, making certain to use only
lowercase letters.
5. From the pop-up menu at the top center of the dialog, choose Format.
MacWeb displays its Format options (see figure 29.40).
I Format
IS] Rutoload Images
(S) Collapse Blank Lines
lUIndoui Background Color; | |
Translation:
I ISD->Mar
[ Defaults")
[ Cancel ) [[ OK
Figure 29.40 MacWeb preferences dialog.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-bij-Step Internet 609
6. Turn on the Autoload Images checkbox.
7. Click the OK button to save your changes.
That's all there is to it. You now have MacWeb configured and ready to go. If you get
tired of automatically loading images on the Web pages you view, you can go back to the
preferences dialog and turn Autoload Images back off.
Browse the Web
1. Make sure MacWeb is launched and that you are connected to the Internet.
2. From MacWeb's Navigate menu, choose EINet Galaxy.
MacWeb displays the contents of the EINet Galaxy page (see figure 29.41).
gi Step-by-Step
i Internet
<
Figure 29.41 MacWeb at EINet Galaxy.
3. Scroll down until you get to the Arts and Humanities topic. Click the underlined
words Visual Arts .
MacWeb takes you to the Visual Arts page on the EINet Galaxy (see figure 29.42).
I hope you're feeling comfortable with clicking on underlined text to move around in the
Web, because if you are, you know the basics of browsing the Web. Feel free to continue
clicking on underlined words (which are called links) to move to other parts of the Web —
it's too large and fast-moving for me to give you any further explicit browsing directions.
If you are wondering what to do if you know a URL for a Web site that you want to visit
and want to point MacWeb directly at that site, keep reading to find out how.
610
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Figure 29.42 MacWeb at the Visual Arts page.
Visit a Specific Web Site
1. Make sure you are connected to the Internet and that you have MacWeb launched.
2. From MacWeb's File menu, choose Open URL. MacWeb displays a dialog into
which you can type a URL {Uniform Resource Locator) (see figure 29.43).
URL: 1 http://iuiinu.apple.com
1
Hotllst: Q
( Concel ] K OK ])
Figure 29.43 Type a specific URL.
3. In the field, type the URL for where you want to go to. To follow along with this
example, type http://www.apple.com.
4. Click the OK button to connect to the Web server at www. apple . com (see figure
29.44).
That's all there is to going to a particular URL. If you see URLs in publications, on busi-
ness cards, or wherever, you can type them into the Open URL dialog or you can also
paste them from other programs. You can also type or paste URLs directly into the
URL box at the top right of the MacWeb window, though this takes some hand-eye
coordination.
Chapter 29 ♦ Step-by-Step Internet 611
Figure 29.44 MacWeb at the Apple Computer Web server.
<
Step-by-Step
Internet
If you are thinking about taking a break, please don't. I'm hoping you'll continue to the
next set of steps so that you can see how to add an entry to your MacWeb hotlist.
Use the Hotlist
1. With the window to the Apple Computer Web server still open, choose Add This
Document from the Hotlist menu.
MacWeb adds the Apple Computer Web server to the bottom of the Hotlist menu.
2. To see how the hotlist works, click the Home button (the one with a little house on
it) at the top of the MacWeb window.
MacWeb loads your default home page.
3. From the Hotlist menu, choose Apple Computer.
MacWeb takes you directly to the Apple Computer Web server.
4. To save your hotlist, go to the Hotlist menu and from the hierarchical Hotlist
Operations menu, choose Save.
MacWeb brings up a Standard File dialog, and you can save the hotlist anywhere
you wish. Remember where you save it, though, because in your next MacWeb
session you may find yourself trying to open your hotlist by dropping down the
612 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Hotlist menu, choosing the Hotlist Operations hierarchical menu, and then using the
Open command to open the hotlist. (Of course, you can avoid these steps by double-
clicking the hotlist icon in order to launch MacWeb.)
5. In the Save dialog, name your hotlist and save it in a location where you'll be able to
find it again.
That's about all there is to using MacWeb, though exploring even a portion of the Web
could take a lifetime. When you finish looking around for now, quit MacWeb by choosing
Quit from the File menu. You may wish to disconnect from the Internet after you quit.
This Is Only the Beginning
If you've followed some or all of the previous tasks, you've done quite a bit on the
Internet. Here is what you've learned to do:
1. Configure MacTCP.
2. Configure MacPPP or InterSLlP.
3. Configure Internet Config.
4. Read, write, and send email with Eudora.
5. Read, write, and post articles with NewsWatcher.
6. Retrieve files via FTP with Anarchie.
7. Browse the World Wide Web with MacWeb.
My apologies if you found this section a bit stilted or boring, but I hope it conveyed just
the information you need to get over tlie hump of using these programs. If something
changed such that the instructions don't work quite right, my apologies — but don't lose
heart. The Internet changes rapidly and you must be flexible enough to deal with that
change. Keep trying and you're bound to get the hang of it soon.
This chapter also brings us to the end of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, It may seem as
though there are lots of pages left, but they're all appendixes, some of which you may
want to browse through. If you're like many people, you've probably already flipped
through them and seen the lists of Internet access providers and the list of HTML tags in
appendix C.
I hope you've enjoyed this book, and I hope you enjoy the Internet.
Appendices
The appendices that follow are mostly straight lists of information. They aren't for
reading or even necessarily repeated reference, but the information in them should
prove valuable in tlie process of finding an Internet access provider and working
with HTML.
Appendix A, Internet
Starter Kit Providers
Appendix A "Internet Starter Kit Providers," is a good-sized list of Internet access
providers around the world who have agreed to provide us (and you with a special
deal of one sort or another) with information so you can easily configure MacTCP
for use with a specific provider. Each of the providers in this appendix has a
MacTCP Prep file that's installed for you by the ISKM Installer — simply Option-drag
the appropriate MacTCP Prep file to your Preferences folder to configure MacTCP
for that provider. See the information under the provider names in appendix A for
additional instructions.
Appendix B, Providers of
Commercial Internet Access
Appendix B, "Providers of Commercial Internet Access" (POCIA), lists Internet
service providers from all around the world, organized by area code (for the U.S.)
and country (for the rest of the world). If you decide not to work with one of the
Internet service providers listed in appendix A, "Internet Starter Kit Providers," for
whatever reason, you should be able to find an appropriate provider in the POCIA
list. Phone numbers and email addresses (if you already have an account on
America Online, say) are listed so you can easily contact the providers to request
more information about their rates and services. This list has been compiled and
maintained by Celestin Company, and thanks are due to them for allowing me to
include it here.
Appendix C, HTML Tags
Although Tonya's chapter 26, "Creating Your Web Page," walks you through all the
basic information about creating a Web page, we felt it would be helpful to bring all
the basic HTML tags together in one place for reference. Hence, appendix C, which
contains that list.
Appendix D, Glossary
Appendix D provides you with a list of common Internet terms and their definitions.
If you're troubled by a vocabulary question — at least, one regarding the Internet —
check here first.
Note
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Appendix
A
Internet Starter Kit
Providers
In order to help you get connected to the Internet as quickly and inexpensively as pos-
sible, we have developed a set of Internet Starter Kit providers. These providers, which
include a number of local, national, and non-U.S. organizations, have agreed to give
Internet Starter Kit readers free Internet access time or special discounts on their services.
Even better, we have included custom MacTCP Prep files for each of these providers on
the Internet Starter Kit disk.
The following information has been provided by the Internet access providers themselves, so
we can't be responsible for any mistakes or changes. Always double-check rates and the like
before signing up.
Organizing these providers was fairly tough, since some cover more than one area and
some cover the whole country. The information on these pages, along with the discussion
in chapter 11, "'Choosing a Connection," should be enough for you to figure out which
provider you would like to try. What should you look for? To keep your costs down, you
probably want to find a provider who you can call with a local phone call, so check the
Cities with Access Numbers and Area Codes items. There may be several that you can
Note
616 Irifeniet Starter Kit for Macintosh
choose from, so use the other information such as rates and the special Starter Kit promo-
tion to figure out which is most advantageous for you. Also check the national providers
pages, because you might actually have lower costs by using one of them. Of course, if
there is no local provider listed in your area, one of the national providers may be your
best bet. If you don't live in the U.S., check the non-U.S. providers who have agreed to
work with us; although this list is relatively small, we hope to make it larger in subse-
quent editions. Once you have decided on a provider to try, use the contact information
and signup process information to sign up with that provider.
Appendix B, "Providers of Commercial Internet Access," contains another list of providers,
but there are no special deals or MacTCP Prep files for those providers. With one of them,
you are on your own. Still, if you can't find a provider that's right for you in this appendix,
check appendix B.
Tliis sounds more complicated than it really is. Don't worr\% it isn't that tough. Here's a
description of the data you will find for each provider:
■ Provider Name: This is the name of the company that provides the access; for
example. Northwest Nexus.
■ Area: This is the area in which the provider is located. Note that the service area
may extend quite a distance from where a provider is located, so look for the cities
and area codes covered.
■ Cities: These are the cities that generally can get local call access to the provider.
Area codes and cities don't always match, so look also for the area codes that are
covered.
■ Area Codes: These are the area codes from which you can access the provider via a
local call — sometimes calls within your own area code may have tolls, so be aware of
what prefix you must dial to connect.
■ Rates: Look here to find out how much it will cost you to use a provider.
■ Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: This is the special deal that the provider gives
you, the Starter Kit owner. Often, these special deals will save you more than the
cost of the book, so you really come out ahead!
■ Signup Process: This is a general overview of how to sign up with a provider.
■ Contact Info: Each provider has listed its snail mail address, phone and fax numbers,
and email addresses for you to use.
■ Web Site: Most providers have Web sites you can visit. This item lists addresses for
these sites.
Note
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 617
The list begins with the providers located on the West coast of the U.S. From there, the list
moves east across the U.S. all the way to the East coast. Next comes U.S. providers that
are in Hawaii. After that come providers who cover the entire nation. Last, but certainly
not least, are non-U.S. providers.
Remember that coverage areas don't always match geographic locations, so make sure you
look over several providers in order to get the best connection for you.
Cinenet Communications,
Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Los Angeles, serving Southern California
Area Codes: 213. 310, 818, 714
Rates: PPP is $30/month, which includes 75 hrs
free. Signup is $30.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: With purchase of
the Starter Kit, you get 30 trial hours at no
charge. These 30 hours must be used up within
60 days of the purchase of the book.
Signup Process: Register online: With
your terminal emulator set to 8-N-l,
dial 310-301-4501 and login as
guest, and go through the registra-
tion process. Your account be
activated a few hours later. You can also
call our voice number 310-301-4500 and
register on the phone.
Contact Info:
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 406
Marina Del Rey
California 90292
Voice: 310-301-4500
Fax: 310-301-4511
Human response: info@clnenet.net
Automated response: auto-info@cinenet.net
Web Site: http: //v/ww. cinenet .net/
EarthLink Network, Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Greater Los Angeles area. CA
Area Codes: 213, 818, 310, 714, 805, 909
Rates: Basic SLIP/PPP: $49.95 setup (waived for
Starter K/t owners), $9.95 per month -h $1.95
per hour.
Extended SLIP/PPP: $49.95 setup (waived for
Starter Kit owners), $29.95 per month. Includes
30 hours -k $1.95 per hour over 30.
PowerUser SLIP/PPP: $49.95 setup (waived for
Starter K/f owners), $49.95 per month, includes
300 hours + $1.95 per hour over 300.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The $49.95
setup fee is waived!
Signup Process: To sign up for EarthLink Network,
just call our sales department at 213-644-9500.
Be sure to mention you have Internet Starter Kit
for Macintosh, Third Edition. You will be faxed a
complete configuration checklist with ail the
information you need to set up your software
and to start net surfing.
Contact Info:
3171 Los Fellz Blvd., Suite 203
Los Angeles, CA 90039
Voice: 213-644-9500 <
Fax: 213-644-9510
Human response: sales@earthlink.net
Automated response: info@earthlink.net
V/eb Site: http://wvw.earthlink.net/
Great Basin Internet Ser-
vices, Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Reno. Sparks, Carson City, Minden,
Gardnerville, Dayton, Virginia City, and Incline
Village, NV
Area Codes: 702, 916
Rates: 14.4 Kbps: $20 startup; $20/month flat rate;
28.8 Kbps: $40 startup; $25/month flat rate.
Email only: $5/month.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We’ll waive the
startup fee!
Signup Process: Decide on a hostname and a local
area city. We place SLIP and PPP accounts In
the <hostname>.<city>.nv.us domains. For
example, someone in Sparks might pick:
mycomputer.sparks.nv.us. Decide whether you
want SLIP or PPP. That’s about it!
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
618 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Contact Info:
1155 W Fourth St. Ste. 225
P.O. Box 6209
Reno NV 89511-6209
Voice: 702-348-7299
Fax: 702-348-9412
Human response: bruce@greatbasin.net
Automated response: info@greatbasin.net
Web Site: http: Z/wv/v/. great basin, net/
Leonardo Internet
Area: West Coast
Cities: Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills,
Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Sherman Oaks,
Studio City, Venice, Manhattan Beach,
Hollywood, North Hollywood, Glendale,
Pasadena, Commerce, Burbank, and Woodland
Hills, CA
Area Codes: 310, 213, 818
Rates: PPP Basic: $17. 50/month, 20 hours,
additional hours $1; $50 startup.
PPP Unlimited: $29. 50/month, unlimited
usage, 2 hours on/off; $50 startup.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Flat-
rate PPP account with the following
rates: $20 startup fee, plus $22/month
(billed in advance on a quarterly basis),
a savings of $7.50 per monthi You can use
this account for as many hours as you want
each month. We also have set up instruction
sheets geared to users of the Internet Starter
Kit (Mac or Windows), and we have friendly and
knowledgeable technical support people who
will help you if you're new to the Internet.
Please give us a call if you would like more
Information on getting connected, building web
sites, or to get the latest prices. Technical
support and sales open 7 days a week.
Signup Process: Call, fax, or email to get an
account.
Contact Info:
927 6th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90403
Voice: 310-395-5500
Fax: 310-395-9924
Human response: info@leonardo.net
Vi/eb Site: http://leonardo.net/
North Bay Network
Area: West Coast
Cities: San Rafael, Nlcasio, and Rohnert Park, CA
Area Codes: 415, 707
Rates: Call or email for details.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $25 off our
normal $50 startup fee!
Signup Process: Dialup Accounts: Customer
receives and completes agreement form and
sends In with payment. You are sent login and
password Information in a format appropriate
for your system/software configuration, email
account name, and local POP phone number.
Contact Info:
20 Minor Court
San Rafael, CA 94903
Voice: 415-472-1600
Fax : 415-472-2461
Human response: support@nbn.com
Automated response: info@nbn.com
Web Site: http: //www.nbn, com/
Primenet Services for the
Internet
Area: West Coast
Cities: Phoenix, Tucson, Ragstaff, Prescott,
Sierra Vista, Yuma, AZ; Fresno, Los Angeles,
Pomona, Santa Ana, CA; Boise, Payette, ID;
Kansas City, MO; MInneapoHs/St. Paul, MN; El
Paso, TX; Eau Claire, Wl
Area Codes: 602, 520, 209, 818, 213, 310, 909,
714, 208, 816, 612, 915, 715.
Rates: Vary from city to city. Startup is $30, and
SLIP/PPP comes with 150 hours of connect
time per month for between $20 and $30.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Starter Kit owners
get 50% off startup fees.
Signup Process: Call our 800 number to give us
your billing Information. You get a 7-day no
obligation trial-— just let us know If you want to
discontinue.
Contact Info:
2320 W. Peoria Ave., Suite A-103
Phoenix, /\Z 85029
Voice: 800-463-8386
Fax: same
Human response: acctinfo@primenet.com
Automated response: lnfo@primenet.com
Web Site: http://vAvw.primenet.com/
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 619
zNET
Area: West Coast
Cities: San Francisco, San Jose. Palo Alto,
Mountain View, San Mateo, Santa Cruz,
Monterey, Milpitas, and Oakland, CA
Area Codes: 619
Rates: Basic Account: $20/month, $25 setup
SLIP/PPP, POP mail, news, 100 hours/month,
limited support, plus our zNET Configuration
guidebook for DOS/WIndows or Macintosh
Premium Account: Rat rate $40/month, $50 setup
SLIP/PPP, POP mall, news; includes a custom
domain name, the Internet Starter Kit book with
TCP/IP software, plus our zNET Configuration
guidebook for DOS/Windows or Macintosh
Full-Time Connection: Starting at $80, custom
setup
24-hour dedicated connection to a 28.8 modem,
SLIP/PPP access, POP mail account, news, plus
our zNET Configuration guidebook for DOS/
Windows or Macintosh
Custom Domain Name Registration: $25 setup,
$10/month (included in the Premium
Account)
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Two
weeks free trial period!
Signup Process: Email to
signup@znet.com, fax 619-755-8149,
or phone 619-755-7772 for zNET
application. Accounts can be activated
same day by voice phone to 619-755-7772 and
application returned to us by U.S. mail.
Contact Info:
504 Vandell Way, Building A
Campbell, CA 95008
Voice: 408-378-9800
Fax: 619-755-8149
Human response: sales@znet.com,
support@znet.com
Automated response: info@znet.com,
signup@znet.com
Web Site: http://www.znet.com/, ftp://
ftp.znet.com/
a2i communications
Area: West Coast
Cities: San Jose, Redwood City, San Francisco,
Oakland, Napa
Area Codes: 408, 415, 510, 707
Rates: $15 start-up fee: $20/month includes 20
hours of SLIP/PPP; additional usage is only
$0.25/hour.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: With original
proof of purchase, second month of service is
free.
Signup Process: Dial an access number with a
modem and terminal emulator (or telnet to
rahul.net) and log in as guest. Browse the
guest menu for information, then select “online
sign-up” and follow the instructions.
Contact Info:
1211 Park Avenue #202
San Jose, CA 95126
Voice: 408-293-8078
Fax: 408-2630461
Human response: support@rahul.net
Automated response: lnfo@rahul.net
Web Site: http://www.rahul.net/
Europa Communications,
Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Portland, OR
Area Codes: 503
Rates: There are two levels of service, and “ra
billing can take place in one, three, or six
month intervals. Service Level 1 provides <
30 hours per month and costs $18 for one
month, $52 for three, or $100 for six. Service
Level 2 offers 150 hours per month and costs
$25 for one month, $73 for three months, or
$145 for six months. There are also disk
quotas of 4 MB (8 MB temporarily) for the Level
1 sen/ice and 10 MB (18 MB temporarily) for
the Level 2 service.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We will waive the
usual $10 startup fee. You will also get a free,
seven day trial account.
Signup Process: You have two choices: 1. Call us
(voice) at 503-222-9508 and we’ll open your
new account. 2. Dial our data line at 503-222-
4244 and login as new. From the menu, you
can read about our services, sign up for your
trial account, etc.
Contact Info:
320 S.W. Stark St.
Suite 427
Portland, OR 97204
Voice: 503-222-9508
Fax: 503-796-9134
Human response: admin@europa.com
Automated response: lnfo@europa.com
V/eb Site: http: //vwav. europa. com/
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
620 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Internet Connect Services
Area: West Coast
Cities: Missoula, Superior, Sealy Swan, Arlee, and
Ravalli, Montana
Area Codes: 406
Rates: Individual accounts are $19.95 a month;
this a flat fee {no hourly charges!). Our normal
set up fee is $24.95.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: 2 weeks free for
Starter K/t owners as well as $14.95 off our
normal startup fee.
Signup Process: Signup can be done over the
phone or by fax, unless we get the call late
Friday. We usually have accounts up within eight
hours.
Contact Info:
2701 North Resen/e St.
Missoula, MT 59801
Voice: 406-721-4952
Fax: 406-549-9318
Human response: jmsj@montana.com
Web Site: http://www.montana.com
InterServe Commu-
nications, Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Palo Alto, CA
Area Codes: Parts of 415, 408, 510
Rates: ISKM setup fee $15 (list is $25). Low-
volume users $20/month includes 15 hours,
$2/hour after 15 hours. Flat Rate $30/month.
Domain name registration $25.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: 2 weeks free trial
and 40% discount on setup fee.
Signup Process: Call us.
Contact Info:
430 Sherman Avenue, Suite 212
Palo Alto, CA 94306
Voice: 415-328-4333
Human response: ray@interserve.com
Automa ted response: info@interserve.com
Web Site: http://www.interserve.com/
Rates: V.34 rates: $20/month, includes 10 hours,
$l/hr thereafter or $29/month unlimited
access ISDN rates: $49/month, includes 10
hours, $2/hrthereafter.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: FREE signup, plus
a free personal Web page. We have a demo
account that can be used by anyone. Contact us
for the current password.
Signup Process: Call LanMinds at 510-843-6389,
we can send you a signup sheet (via fax, email,
or snail mail). You can also request a signup
sheet by sending email to
adniln@lanminds . com.
Contact Info:
1442A Walnut St. suite 431
Berkeley, CA 94709
Voice: 510-843-6389
Fax: 510-843-6390
Human response: dan@lanmlnds.com
Automat ed response: info@lanminds.com
V/eb Site: http://www.lanminds.com/
A MobiusNet
Area: West Coast
Cities: San Francisco area
Area Codes: 415, 510
Rates: There is a $25 startup fee. The
sen/ice is $25/month for 100 hours online/
month. Additional hours are $l/hr.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The startup fee
is waived and you will be given a 10 day free
trial.
Signup Process: Call MobiusNet to provide us with
your username and password. Your account
will be available for use almost immediately.
Contact Info:
2301 Harrison Street
Suite 101
San Francisco, CA 94110
Voice: 415-821-0600
Human response: russ@mobius.net
Autom ated response: info@mobius.net
V/eb Site: http: //wv/w. mobius.net/
LanMinds
Area: West Coast
Cities: Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Walnut
Creek, Lafayette Orinda, San Rafael, Mill Valley,
Richmond, (all in CA)
Area Codes: 415, 510
Northwest Nexus Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Seattle, Bellevue, Auburn, Lynnwood, Lacey,
Olympia, Shelton, Tacoma, Mt. Vernon, WA
Area Codes: 206, 360
Rates: Personal PPP: $30/month (less with special
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 621
offer), $30 startup fee; other rates on request.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: With coupon In
book, 25% off monthly charges for personal
SLIP and personal PPP accountsi
Signup Process: Use a terminal program set to 8,
N, 1; dial 206455-8455; login as new; press
Enter for password; read Information; provide
billing and account Information.
Contact Info:
P.O. Box 40597
Bellevue, WA 98015-4597
Voice: 206-455-3505
Fax: 206455-4672
Human response: support@halcyon.com
Automated response: info@halcyon.com
V/eb Site: http://www.halcyon.com/
OlympusNet
Area: West Coast
Cities: Port Angeles, Port Ludlow, Port Townsend,
Sequim, WA
Area Codes: 360
Rates: $30 startup; $75 quarterly for 50
hours per month.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $10 off
first month's access!
Signup Process: Phone 360-385-0464 to
sign up.
Contact Info:
P.O. Box 1824
Port Townsend, WA 98368
Voice: 360-385-0464
Human response: sales@olympus.net
Automated response: info@olympus.net
V^eb Site: http: //wwvz. Olympus. net/
Whidbey Connections, Inc.
Area: West Coast
Cities: Oak Harbor, Coupeville, Freeland, Langley,
Clinton, Greenbank, WA
Area Codes: 360, 206
Rates: SLIP/PPP $20/month, $10 startup for
Starter Kit owners; Standard Shell $15/month,
$10 startup fee. All accounts Include 100 hours
per month access time.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: For the Starter Kit
promotion, we are offering $10 off of our
standard startup fee.
Signup Process: Access to an account requires
submission of a short application with user's
name, address, userid, password, computer
and modem type, and billing information.
Application can be filled out through the mall,
over the phone or fax, or at our office. Email
applications are also accepted. Accounts will be
activated on the day the applications are
received.
Contact Info;
P.O. Box 1048
Coupeville, WA 98239
Voice: 360-678-1070 360-321-0608
Fax: 360-678-6129
Human response: admin@whidbey.net
Automated response: lnfo@whldbey.net
V/eb Site: http: //wvw/.v/hidbey. net/
Exchange Network Ser-
vices, Inc. (ExchangeNet)
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Cleveland, OH and surrounding area
Area Codes: 216
Rates: SLIP/PPP rates: $25 startup ($20
^ rw w/Starter Kit discount), $25 monthly 'v
(includes 50 hours usage). Additional JJ.
hours over 50 billed at $l/hr. <
'yy Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $5 off
startup fee and 1 week free trial account.
^ Signup Process: Online registration via
terminal emulator available at 731-0900 login
as newuser. Fax or mall printout of registration
may be requested.
Contact Info:
25931 Euclid Avenue #145
Euclid. Ohio 44132
Voice: 216-261-4593
Fax: 216-261-2236
Human response: support@en.com
Automated response: info@en.com
Web Site: http://www.en.com/
ICON - A Service of Saint
Louis Internet Connections
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Currently the Saint Louis, Missouri metro-
politan area.
Area Codes: 314
Rates: Personal Subscription: $20 registration fee,
$25/month for unlimited PPP/SLIP access.
Business Subscription: $100 registration fee.
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
622 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
$ 100/month for unlimited PPP/SLIP access.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: First month is
free.
Signup Process: Call 314-241-0969 or email
info@icon-stl.net for account registration.
Contact Info:
710 North Tucker Suite 800
Saint Louis, MO 63101
Voice: 314-241-0969
Fax: 314-241-1249
Human response: info@icon-stl.net
Automated response:
Web Site: http://www.icon-stl.net/
Internet Access Cincinnati
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Cincinnati, Hamilton, Oxford, Northern
Kentucky, Peoria, IN Versailles, IN
Area Codes: 513, 606, 812
Rates: $28.00 — 20% off our usual monthly flat
rate. Setup fee waived and absolutely no
additional fees. Buy 10 months and get
12 .
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Two
weeks free trial. Also, In the event of
cancellation, our usual policy offers a
full refund for the current month and any
pre-paid months.
Signup Process: Call our modem pool at 513-887-
8855, or telnet to access . lac . net. log in as
new and follow the directions or call our office
at 513-333-0033. For personal assistance,
drop by our office at 435 Elm Street #305 in
the downtown Cincinnati Convention Place Mall,
on the skywalk between the Hyatt Regency
Hotel lobby and Convention Center.
Contact Info:
P.O. Box 602
Hamilton Ohio 45012-0602
Voice: 513-887-8877
Fax: 513-887-2085
Human response: office@iac.net
Automated response: info@lac.net
Web Site: http: //wwv/. iac.net/
InterAccess Co.
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Chicagoland metropolitan area, including
Chicago, Northbrook, Tinley Park, Wheaton,
Schiller Park, and Hoffman Estates, IL
Area Codes: 708, 312, part of 815
Rates: Business and Personal Accounts for single
users: Rat-rate monthly: SLIP/PPP/Plug n’
Play, $30/month, $28/month for credit card
payers.
Timed monthly: SLIP/PPP/Plug n’ Play, $10/month
including 5 hours, additional hours at $2.30/
hour.
Flat-rate quarterly: SLIP/PPP/Plug n’ Play, $73/qtr.
Flat-rate yearly: SLIP/PPP/Plug n’ Play, $260/yr.
Plug n' Play Installation Fee: $15.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The installation
fee is waived!
Signup Process: Typically you log in to our dialup
number, 708-671-0237, login: guest, with a
standard communication program and fill out an
application online. Someone calls to establish
authenticity, you are mailed a startup package,
and you're on. You may also fax or mail
applications.
Contact Info:
3345 Commercial Ave.
Northbrook, IL 60062
Voice: 708-498-2542
Fax: 708-498-3289
Human response: sales@interaccess.com
Automated response:
info@interaccess.com
Web Site: http: //w\w;. interaccess. com/
InterSource
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Bloomington, IN
Area Codes: 812
Rates: Call for rates
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Startup fee
waived, 14 day trial period.
Contact Info:
2613 E. 3rd St.
Bloomington, IN 47401
Voice: 812-332-2722
Fax: 812-332-2940
Human response: help@intersource.com
Automated response: info@intersource.com
IQuest Network Services
Area; Northern Midwest
Cities: Indianapolis, Anderson, Muncle, Lafayette.
Kokomo, Bloomington, and Terre Haute, IN;
Chicago, IL; Columbus. OH
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 623
Area Codes: 317, 312, 708, 614, 812
Rates: Dialup SLIP/PPP Access: 14.4 Access: $15
per month for 120 hours; 28.8 Access: $20 per
month for 120 hours.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The first 15
hours of service are free!
Signup Process: If you call the 800 number by
3:00, the account will be active by 8:00 p.m.
that evening.
Contact Info:
2035 East 46th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46205
Voice: 800-844-UNIX (8649)
Fax: 317-259*7289
Human response: info@lquest.net
Automated response: lnfo@lquest.net
Web Site: http: //v/ww. iquest.net/
Red River Net
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Fargo, ND, and Sioux Falls, SD
Area Codes: 701, 605
Rates: $30 one-time setup; $25 a month
for service: 20% off for six or more
months of service paid in advance.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Free
setup for Starter Kit owners — a $30
value!
Signup Process: Call for ordering information.
Contact Info:
P.O. Box 388
Fargo, ND 58107
Voice: 701-232-2227
Fax: 701-232-2910
Human response: lien@rmet.com
Automated response: info@rrnet.com
V/eb Site: http: //v/ww. rrnet.com/
Tezcat Communications
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Chicago
Area Codes: 312
Rates: $28, $60, $220, for monthly, quarterly, or
yearly access respectively. There are no startup
or hourly fees for use of Tezcat's Personal PPP
service.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Internet Starter
Kit owners qualify for a one week trial access
period. Monthly charge for Personal PPP access
is $28 with no startup fees, hourly charges, or
time limits.
Signup Process: Customers may either telnet to
tezcat . com and login as new, or call our
voice support line (312) 850-0181 for assign-
ment of password and IP address. User will be
given a complete walk-through to ensure that
they are online before being turned loose.
Contact Info:
1573-A N. Milwaukee
Suite 440
Chicago, IL. 60622
Voice: 312-8500181
Fax: 312-850-0492
Human response: sales@tezcat.net
Automated response: info@tezcat.net
V/eb Site: http: //wv/w. tezcat .com/
Traverse Communication
Company
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Traverse City, Ml and all Michigan cities
through 800# access
Area Codes: 616 (primary), 517, 313,
810 (800#)
Rates: $35 signup (includes Internet g.
Starter Kit for Windows or Macintosh); $20 <
signup for previous owners of ISK, $20/mo
subscription includes 10 hrs access, $2.00/
hr for hours 11-20, $1.50/hr for hours 21-
30, $1.00/hr for hours over 30, $0.13/min
surcharge for 800# access. Educational rates
available for institutional use. Network pricing
by arrangement.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $15.00 of regular
signup fee and five free hours access in the
first month.
Signup Process: Sign and deliver Customer
Agreement Form and signup fee to our offices
(by mail or In person). Password will be mailed
or faxed within 24 hrs. Upon receipt, follow
installation instructions and dial 616-935-4946
to connect. Login for user j blow takes the
form of Jblow+ppp.
Contact Info:
223 Grandview Parkway, Ste 108
Traverse City, Ml 49684
Voice: 616-935-1705
Fax: 616-935-3547
Human response: support@traverse.com
Automated response: info@traverse.com
Web Site: http: //vwav. traverse.com/
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
624 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Worldwide Access
Area: Northern Midwest
Cities: Chicago and the surrounding suburban area
Area Codes: 312, 708, 815
Rates: SLIP/PPP dialup accounts are $25/month
flat rate. NO startup fees. NO time limits. All
modem speeds up to and including 28.8 Kbps
24 hour, 365 day per year access.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: One free month
of service.
Signup Process: We accept service orders by fax or
mail in addition to our convenient signup online
service. Customer accounts can be created In
as little as 15 minutes. We offer complete
support to the Macintosh user in the form of
software setup files and detailed instructional
materials on setup and configuration. Our
courteous technical support group is also
available with extended business hours to help
the individual get online as quickly and
effortlessly as possible.
Contact Info:
23 Southfield Drive
Vernon Hills, IL 60061-3258 f—Tr-
Voice: 708-367-1870
Fax: 708-367-1872 ^0^
Human response: support@wwa.com
Automated response: info@wwa.com
Web Site; http: //wwv/. wwa.com/
ABWAM, Inc.
Area: Midwest
Cities: Denver, CO
Area Codes: 303
Rates: hourly plan: $25 startup, $2.40/hr, no
minimum monthly plan: $25 startup, $20/mo,
1st 30 hrs, $2.40/hr after, Dedicated dialup:
$200 startup, $125/mo, 28.8 unlimited hours.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Startup fee
reduced to $10. Seven day trial period: if not
satisfied, full refund, including startup fees.
Signup Process: We send you an application by
mail, fax, or dialup; once completed, we will
create your account, call you at your daytime
phone number, and give you the Instructions
needed to get online.
Contact Info:
8605 F-5 West Cross Dr. #304
Littleton, CO 80123
Voice: 303-730-6050
Human response: dwatson@abwam.com
Automated response: info@abwam.com
Web Site: http; //v/ww. abwam.com/
CSDC
Area: Midwest
Cities: Denver Colorado, Boulder Colorado
Area Codes: 303
Rates: PPP Access: $20/month. Includes 40 free
hours. $2/hr thereafter. $150 maximum. $20
startup fee.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: 50% off the
startup fee.
Signup Process: Call us, we will set your account
up immediately and mail or fax you an applica-
tion form. The form Is available online at http://
www.csd.net/applicatlon.html.
Contact Info:
2525 Arapahoe Suite E4-447
Boulder, CO 80302
Voice: 303-665-8053
Fax: 303-443-0808
Human response: support@csd.net
^ rw Automated response: lnfo@csd.net
Site; http://VAVw.csd.net/
^ Illuminati Online
Area: Southern Midwest
Cities: Austin, Houston, San Antonio; call or send
email for Information on other parts of central
and southeast Texas.
Area Codes: 512, 713, 210; 817, 915, 407 (call
for Information)
Rates: $15/month for 30 hours; 50 cents/
additional hour; $28/month for 80 hours; 30
cents/additional hour; Telnet accounts: $10/
month for unlimited use, but no modem time.
Setup PPP/SLIP account: $50 ($25 for Starter
Kit owners). PPP/SLIP accounts include a shell
account at no extra charge. All accounts include
5 MB of hard disk space. Additional space is 2
cents/MB/day or $2/5MB/month. Personal
web sites are Included without charge.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The MacPPP
setup fee is reduced to $25, and the first two
weeks online are free.
Signup Process: 1. Set your modem to 8 bits, no
parity, 1 stop bit, and VTIOO terminal emula-
tion. 2. Have your modem dial 1-512-448-8950
(or just 448-8950 in Austin). 3. Log In as new
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 625
and complete the registration dialog. 4. Enter
your preferred method of payment, and put
ISKM down as your referral. That’s it! You can
also telnet to io . com Instead of dialing in by
modem.
Contact Info:
P.O.Box 18957
Austin, TX 78760
Voice: (512) 462-0999
Fax: (512) 447-1144
Human response: admin@lo.com
Automated response: info@io.com
Web Site: http: //wv/v/. io.com/
NeoSoft, Inc.
Area: Southern Midwest
Cities: Houston, TX Ft. Worth, TX New Orleans, LA
St. Louis, MO
Area Codes: 713, 817, 504, 314
Rates: $40 startup fee, $34. 95/month; Personal
$80 startup fee, $74.95/month;
Corporate call for dedicated pricing.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Two free V
weeks. rTj^
Signup Process: At the moment, call for V \/---
setup. Coming soon: online signup.
Contact Info:
1770 St. James Place
Suite 500
Houston, TX 77056
Voice: 1-800-438-6367
Fax: 713-968-5801
Human response: sales@neosoft.com
Automated response: info@neosoft.com
Web Site: http: //v/ww. neosoft.com/
Angel Networks, Inc.
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: New York City
Area Codes: 212, 718
Rates: Basic: $15 per month + $1 per hr (first 20
hrs free). Standard: $30 per month (with no
hourly charges).
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: No signup or
setup fees. Two weeks free.
Signup Process: Give us a call. We will create your
account while you are on the phone with us and
walk you through the login process. On-site
setup is also available.
Contact Info:
27 West 20th Street
Suite 1002
New York, NY 10011
Voice: 212-366-0881
Fax: 212-366-6703
Human response: rmah@angel.net
Automated response: lnfo@angel.net
Web Site: http://www.angel.net/
FishNet, Prometheus
Information Corp.
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: Philadelphia
Area Codes: 610, 215
Rates: Unlimited use $35 per month.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: No setup charges
and a two week, money-back guarantee.
Signup Process: 1. Call us at (610)337-9994 2.
Mention that you've purchased the
^ Internet Starter Kit 3. Provide us with the
following: Name, Address, phone #,
Credit card # (Visa, MC, Discover) or
Purchase Order # 4. Start surfing the <
Internet!
Contact Info:
583 Shoemaker Road
Suite 220
King Of Prussia, PA 19406
Voice: 610-337-9994
Fax: 610-337-9918
Human response: pete@pond.com
Automated response: info@pond.com
Web Site: http://www.pond.com/
1-2000, Inc.
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: New York City, Long Island City,
Farmingdale, Mlneola, Babylon, Selden.
Bayside, White Plains, and RIverhead, NY;
Stamford, CT; Elizabeth and Hackensack, NJ;
Philadelphia. PA
Area Codes: 516, 914, 718, 215, 212, 203,
908, 201
Rates: Dialup: $20 setup, $30 monthly. Call for
other services.
Internet
Starter Kit
Pro\iders
626 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Starter Kit plus
one month service and setup: $59.95! One
week trial period!
Signup Process: MasterCard, Visa, or check. Fax,
email, telephone, fill out form online from any
access number with login: info, password:
newuser or on our Web site.
Contact Info:
416 Main Street
Metuchen, NJ 08840
Voice: 516-867-6379 or 908-906-0197
Fax: 908-906-2396
Human response: mikef@i-2000.com
Automated response: info@i-2000.com
Web Site: http://wwv.i-2000.com/
North Shore Access
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: Boston, Georgetown, Lynn, Manchester-by-
the-Sea, MA
Area Codes: 617, 508
Rates: PPP account: $30/month for 60
hours connect time, $0.50/hr
thereafter. Includes 5 MB disk quota,
shell access, and personal servers for
FTP, gopher, and WWW.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $20 off
our regular signup fee (normally $50 dollars).
Signup Process: Online signup: dial one of our
access numbers (617-593-4557, 617-927-
5200, 508-352-5533, or 508-526-2100) with a
terminal program, 8 bits/no parity/1 stop bit,
and login as new, no password. Or call our
office at 617-593-3110 and press 1 for sales.
Contact Info:
145 Munroe Street. Suite 405
Lynn, MA 01901
Voice: 617-593-3110
Fax: 617-593-6858
Human response: info@shore.net
Automated response:
Web Site: http://wvrw.shore.net/
Panix Public Access Net-
works, Corp.
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: NYC, NY, Jersey City, NJ, Nassau County
Long Island. NY West Suffolk County Long
Island, NY(comlng soon Westchester
County, NY)
Area Codes: 212, 201, 516 (coming soon 914)
Rates: $35/month (or $400/year save $20) There Is
no startup fee.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: One free month
when they pay for the first month. (The first 2
months for $35.)
Signup Process: 1. Connect to panix.com and
login as help (date line numbers: 212-741-
4545, 201-963-1500, 516-626-7863, 516-246-
8262) 2. Fill out the registration form 3. A
member of our staff will call you back and start
up your account.
Contact Info:
15 West 18th Street 5th Floor
attn: Stacey Goldsmith
New York, NY 10011
Voice: 741 4400
Fax: 741 5311
Human response: info-person@panix.com
Automated response: info@panlx.com
Web Site: http: //\w/w. panix. com/
ServiceTech, Inc.
Area; Northern East Coast
Cities: Rochester, NY, Buffalo, NY,
Syracuse, NY, Canandaigua. NY, Corning,
NY, Utica, NY, Toronto, Ontario. Canada,
Binghamton, NY (July 95), Albany, NY
(August 95)
Area Codes: 716, 315, 607, 518, 416, 905, 800
Rates: Flat-rate access service for $25.00 a month.
This offers full access, with no hourly fees. Our
rate includes free use of our World Wide Web
server for personal home pages, and the use of
our FTP server for publishing files. All of our
clients also receive a static, or dedicated, IP
address at no extra charge.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We will waive our
one-time startup fee of $20.00, as well as offer
a free trial access period of two weeks.
Signup Process: Signup is either accomplished
online via our Web page at: http : / /
WWW . servtech . com/ or via phone or fax.
Accounts are activated within one business
day. PC or Mac customers who request them,
receive Installation disks to assist them in
configuring their accounts. We also have a
large technical support staff to answer
questions and solve problems.
Contact Info:
182 Monroe Avenue
Rochester. NY 14607
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 627
Voice: 716-263-3360
Fax: 716-423-1596
Human response: sales@servtech.com
Automated response: info@servtech.com
V/eb Site: http: Z/wv/v/. servtech.com/
Telerama Public Access
Internet
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: Pittsburgh, PA
Area Codes: 412
Rates: PPP Setup fee (one time): $10. Monthly fee
includes unlimited shell access and 3 hrs/day
PPP access: $20. PPP access in excess of 3
hrs/day: $2/hr.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We waive the PPP
setup fee for all Internet Starter Kit purchasers
and provide 2 weeks of free access time.
Signup Process: Call 412-481-4644 with a terminal
emulator and log in as new. Create your
account. Modem speeds of up to 28.8K
are supported.
Contact Info:
P.O. Box 60024
Pittsburgh, PA 15211
Voice: 412-481-3505
Fax: 412-481-8568
Human response: sysop@telerama.lm.com
Automated response: info@telerama.lm.com
Web Site: http://www.lm.com/
The Internet Access Com-
pany, Inc.
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: Connecticut, MA, Hartford, New Hampshire:
Derry (as of 5/95) New York: NYC / Manhattan
area (as of 6/95)
Area Codes: 617, 508, 203, 603, 212
Rates: PPP access rates for new accounts as a
result of ISK books: Rrst month FREE, with
normal billing to begin in the second month of
service. Normal billing Is: $29.00 for 40 hours/
month; or $49.00 for 300 hours/month. (Each
of the above plans normally has a one-time
$20.00 startup fee that will be waived in
conjunction with this offer.) These are flat rate
prices; there are never any hourly charges with
TIAC dial-up accounts. For more Info, send email
to lnfo@tiac.net.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Receive their first
month online FREE, with normal billing to begin
in the second month of service.
Signup Process: Call a TIAC Customer Service
Representative at 617/276-7200, and let him
know that you’re calling to take advantage of a
special offer in the ISK book.
Contact Info:
175 The Great Road
Suite 210
Bedford, MA 01730
Voice: 617-276-7200
Fax: 617-275-2224
Human response: support@tiac.net
Automated response: info@tiac.net
Web Site: http: //v/v/w. tiac.net/
UltraNet Communications,
Inc.
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: Clinton. Framingham, Littleton, ^
Lowell, Marlboro, Waltham, Worcester, 3.
and Westboro <
Area Codes: 508, 617, 603
Rates: Plan: Cost per month/included
Hours/Additional Hours — Low-End: $5/2/
$2.50— Economy: $10/5/$2.00— Value: $20/
20/$1.00— Heavy: $30/60/$0.50— Power
User; $50/200/$0.25— Unlimited; $100/
Unllmlted/$0.00. Unlike our competitors, there
are NO STARTUP FEES!
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners; Receive 10 free
hours, (twice our normal promotion) and no
startup fees.
Signup Process: You may sign up by calling one of
our modem lines with a terminal emulator, and
sign up as user new, and follow instructions.
You may also call our voice number, and be
signed up over the phone.
Contact Info:
910 Boston Post Rd.
Marlboro, MA 01752
Voice: 508-229-8400
Fax: 508-229-2375
Human response: u-esb@ultranet.com
Automated response: info@ultranet.com
V/eb Site: http: //vw/w.ultranet .com/
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
628 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
WestNet Internet Services
Area: Northern East Coast
Cities: Rye, NY
Area Codes: 914
Rates: SLIP/PPP: $30/month Menu/Unix Shell:
$15/month $20 sign-up fee for all accounts.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Receive a 2 week
trial period (regular users receive a 1 week
trial).
Signup Process: Dial our modem number with any
terminal program and login as new. Rll out the
New User Registration form. We will get back to
you within 24 hours when your account is
created.
Contact Info:
40 Redfield St
Rye, NY 10580
Voice: (914) 967-7816
Human response: staff@westnet.com
Automated response: info@westnet.com
Web Site: http: //wwvz. westnet.com/
Gulf Coast Internet
Company
Area: Southern East Coast
Cities: Pensacola, Ft. Walton Beach, Niceville, Gulf
Breeze, Milton, Destin, Crestview, Shalimar, FL;
Mobile, Foley, Atmore, Monroville, AL
Area Codes: 904, 334
Rates: $15 one-time connect fee & $20/month for
20 hours or $40/month for 100 hours.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: 10 Free addi-
tional hours the first month of service.
Signup Process: Just call us at 904-438-5700 for
the location of a computer store near you that
will get you on the net!
Contact Info:
Voice: 904-438-5700
Fax: 904-438-5750
Human response: tom@gulf.net
Automated response: info@gulf.net
Web Site: http://www.gulf.net/
Florida Online
Area: Southern East
Coast
Cities: Cocoa and Orlando, FL
Area Codes: 407
Rates: Dialup accounts: $20 per month, PPP/SLIP
include 50 hours (Includes free preconfigured
software). No setup fee on dialup accounts.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Free first month
of a three-month or longer account!
Signup Process: All signups are via the telephone,
toll-free local 407-635-8888 or 800-676-2599,
seven days a week. All major credit cards
accepted.
Trial account (text-based): 407-633-4710, login as
new with password newuser
Contact Info:
3815 N. US 1
Suite 59
Cocoa, FL 32926
Voice: 407-635-8888 or 800-676-2599
Fax: 407-635-9050
Human response: admin@digital.net
Automated response: info@digital.net
V/eb Site: http: Z/wv/v/. digit al.net/
MindSpring Enterprises,
Inc.
Area: Southern East Coast
Cities: Atlanta, GA; Columbus, GA;
Birmingham, AL; West Point/Lagrange, GA;
Lanett, AL; Newnan, Auburn/Opelika, AL
Area Codes: 404, portions of 706 and 205
Rates: Dialup plans (PPP connections, include 3
MB on our server for Web pages and FTP, up to
28.8 Kbps access, Usenet and ClarINet news,
email, Telnet, Gopher, Archie, FTP, chat, talk.
Ping, etc.)
Standard: $35 startup fee; $15 per month for 15
hours; $1 per hour over 15.
Flat rate: $35 startup fee; $35 per month for
unlimited use (not meant to be a full-time
connection).
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $10 off the $35
startup feel
Signup Process: Call 404-888-0725 to sign up over
the phone. Or, send email to
lnfo@mlndspring.com to receive signup
form via email.
Contact Info:
430 10th Street. NW
Atlanta. GA 30318-5768
Voice: 404-888-0725
Fax: 404-888-9210
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 629
Human response: sales@mindsprlng.com
Automated response: info@mindspring.com
Web Site: http://www.fiiindspring.com/
Internet Interstate
Area: East Coast
Cities: Washington D.C., greater metropolitan area
Area Codes: 301, 202, some 703
Rates: Intro Plan: 5hrs/mo. 1.50/hr after, 14.75/mo
w/ $25 setup: Basic Plan: 22hrs/mo. 1.50/hr
after , 21.75/mo w/ $25 setup; Power Plan: 4hrs
free/day, 12pm-7am free in addition, 1.00/hr
after, 29.75/mo w/$25 setup: Dedicated Plan:
Full-time connection $175 setup plus a modem
$150/month, $125 if paid one year in advance.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Customers who
mention they are using the Internet Starter Kit
will receive a two week free trial and a 50%
discount of setup fees to $12.50 (at the end of
the trial).
Signup Process: Customers can call our voice
number 301-652-4468 or send a fax
301-652-0566 to sign up. We accept
payment by credit card monthly or
one year in advance, or by check for
one year in advance only.
Payments for a year in advance
get a 10% discount. Basic
information required Is
requested login id, password,
billing plan, mailing address, and contact phone
number. Accounts will be activated within 24
hours of the request.
Contact Info:
4925 St. Elmo Avenue
Bethesda, MD 20814
Voice: 301-652-4468
Fax: 301-652-0566
Human response: zamfir@intr.net
Automated response: info@intr.net
V/eb Site: wwv/. intr.net/
Tennessee, and new sites in the above states
on an on going basis.
Area Codes: 615, 701, 704, 706, 803
Rates: Dial-up rates are usage based. The dial-up
plans are: Introductory $15/mo. 5 hrs included
$2.50/hr. thereafter: Basic $35/mo. 40 hrs
included $2.00/hr. thereafter; Executive $65/
mo. 80 hrs included $1.50/hr. thereafter;
Corporate $100/mo. 130 hrs included $1.15/
hr. thereafter. In addition, multiple users billed
to the same account can be created for only
$2/month, with the total accumulated usage
time for all secondary accounts charged to the
total for the billed account. Dedicated accounts
are fixed-rate per month. Dedicated accounts
may be dial-up (i.e., using standard telephone
connection, such as SLIP or PPP), but with a
private modem (I.e., accessible only to that
customer, and available 24 hours/day, 7 days/
week, with no accumulated hourly charge); or
they can be leased lines, with fees depending
on the costs of the leased lines. Dedicated
accounts start at $200/month.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The
standard startup fee for new SunBelt.Net
users Is $25. For owners of Internet
Starter Hit for Macintosh, this startup fee
will be waived.
Signup Process: Users may call their local
SunBelt.Net Customer Service number
and provide all of the necessary
Information for creation of their account.
The new account will be created while the user
is still on the telephone, and will be available
for use immediately. Automatic billing is done
via Visa or MasterCard.
Contact Info:
330 E. Black St.
Rock Hill, South Carolina 29731
Voice: 1-800-950-4SBN (950-4726), plus local
lines for the geographies served
Fax: 803-324-6134
Human response: lnfo@sunbelt.net,
webmaster@sunbelt.net
y
cu
a
<
SunBelt.Net
Area: East Coast
Cities: Charlotte, NC, Lexington, NC, Abbeville/
Due West, SC, Charleston, SC, Chester, SC,
Columbia, SC, Rorence, SC, Greenville, SC,
KIngstree, SC, Lancaster, SC, Moncks Comer,
SC, North Augusta, SC, Rock Hill, SC.
Spartanburg. SC, Sumter, SC, Augusta, GA
Also becoming available in several cities in
Web Site: http://www.sunbelt.net/
Hawaii OnLine
Area: Hawaii
Cities: Island-wide coverage — Oahu, Maui, Kauai,
Hawaii, Molokai; Lanai 2nd quarter 1995
Area Codes: 808
Rates: Standard Plan: Menu Shell, BBS, and SLIP
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
630 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
or PPP access, $25 per month, $22.50 with
Auto Credit Card Billing. Overtime Rates: $.75
per hour. Startup Fee: $40.
Access Hours: 40 hours peak time usage per
month, nonpeak 12 a.m. — 10 a.m. free.
Premium Plan: Menu Shell, BBS, and SLIP or PPP
access, $45 per month, $42.50 with Auto Credit
Card Billing. Access Hours: Unlimited.
Startup Fee: $40.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: $15 off the
normal startup fee! (During the signup process,
use the ad code of “Hayden.")
Signup Process: From a standard terminal
program, dial any Hawaii Online local access
number: Oahu 533-7113, Maui 244-8133,
Kauai 245-6115, Hawaii 935-7878. Login as
guest — a password is not required. From the
Guest Menu, select #8: “Sign-up for Access
Now!" The system will prompt you for all
information. If you select Credit Card Billing,
your account will be activated immediately. If
you have questions, please call our in-state
Hotline at 800-207-1880.
Contact Info:
737 Bishop Street
Suite 2305
Honolulu, HI
Voice: 808-533-6981, 808-246-1880
Fax: 808-534-0089
Human response: pjc@aloha.net
(primary), lynn@aloha.net
(secondary)
Automated response: lnfo@aloha.net
Web Site: http://wwvv.aloha.net/
LavaNet, Inc.
Area: Hawaii
Cities: Island of Oahu (Honolulu and more)
Area Codes: 808 (Oahu only)
Rates: For shell account or SLIP/PPP account: $30
startup fee. Flat-rate plan (any account type):
$28/month for virtually unlimited access. Timed-
rate plan (any account type): $14/month for 10
hours of access, beyond that $2/hour.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Call us at 808-
545-5282 to arrange a special trial account.
Pay only a $15 startup fee ($20 for combination
accounts), and connect to LavaNet for a two-
week trial of our flat-rate account! Trial offer
good for Oahu residents only.
Signup Process: Customers receive our startup kit
either through the mail or by picking it up at our
office in downtown Honolulu. Customers must
then return a signed copy of the User Agree-
ment (via mail, fax, or hand delivery), at which
point the customer’s account Is activated.
Contact Info:
733 Bishop St. Suite 1590
Honolulu, HI 96813
Voice: 808-545-LAVA (i.e. 545-5282)
Technical Support: 808-545-7205
Fax: 808-545-7020
Human response: lava-info@lava.net
Automated response: info@lava.net
Web Site: http://www.lava.net/
The Portal Information
Network
Area: Nationwide & Canada
Cities: Over 1,100 POPs in the U.S. and Canada
Area Codes: All
Rates: Portal IP Connection: $19.95 startup.
$19.95 per month. Three ways to
connect: $.95/hour: Portal S.F. Bay Area
POPs; $2.50/hour: SprIntNet offpeak
hours: $9. 50/hour: SprIntNet peak
hours; $2.95/hour: CPN.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We’ll
waive the signup fee and give you a
$15 credit!
Signup Process: Complete and fax (or
mail) the form in the back of the book.
Contact Info:
20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard
Suite 200
Cupertino, CA 95014
Voice: 408-973-9111
Fax: 408-725-1580
Human response: sales@portal.com
Automated response: info@portal.com
Web Site: http://www.portal.com/
Global OnLine
Area: Japan
Cities: Tokyo, Osaka, other POPs in progress as of
April 1995.
Area Codes: 03, 06 (in Japan)
Rates: PPP signup fee: 2500 yen; Monthly rate:
4500 yen for 10 hours; Overtime rate: 15 yen
per minute.
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 631
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Users will receive
a free 3 week trial or 10 hours, whichever
comes first. For PPP customers we will reduce
our signup fee by 50%, from 5000 yen to 2500
yen.
Signup Process: Call Global Online in Tokyo at (03)
5330-9380, or fax us at (03) 5330-9381 to
request a signup form. You can also obtain our
signup forms via autoresponse email to
signup@gol.com (for Unix shell), signup-
ppp@gol.com (for PPP accounts), signup -
uucp@gol.com (for UUCP accounts), or
signup-email@gol.com (for email-only
accounts). Complete the form and return it to us
via mail or fax and we will set up your account
generally within 1 business day of receipt.
Contact Info:
1-56-1-302 Higashi Nakano
Nakano-ku
Tokyo 164, Japan
Voice: +81-3-5330-9380
Fax: +81-3-5330-9381
Human response: sales@gol.com
Automated response: info@gol.com, info-
j@gol.com
V/eb Site: http: //wv/w. gol.com/ t
Helix Internet
Area: Canada
Cities: Vancouver (604-689-8577), Kelowna (604-
762-5899)
Area Codes: 604
Rates: Individual: Free trial during first week,
$19.95/mo for 20 hours online, $1.50for
additional hours online, $25.00 account
activation fee. Corporate: $49.00/mo for 4 email
addresses, $1.50 per hour while online, $95.00
account activation fee. Free text based Web
page. Web pages: $49. 00/mo for unlimited
pages, $.09/MB after first, free 500 MB per
month, $199 server set up fee, $95/hour for
design, HTML programming. Dedicated lines:
please call 604-689-8544 for pricing please
note all prices do not include taxes.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: All new accounts
for Starter Kit owners will be discounted. Please
call us for details at 604-689-8544.
Signup Process: 1. Have your modem dial 604-
689-8577. 2. Login as guest (no password
required). 3. Choose application process or call
604-689-8544 for new account information and
help.
Contact Info:
902-900 W. Hastings
Vancouver, BC V6J 3L1
Voice: 604-689-8544
Fax: 604-685-2554
Human response: staff@helix.net
Automated response: info@hellx.net
Web Site: http://www.helix.net/
internet service and infor-
mation systems (isis) inc.
Area: Canada
Cities: Halifax Nova Scotia (Coming soon to
Windsor, Wolfville, Kentville, Sydney, and
Yarmouth) (These are expected to be online
within the next 6 months.)
Area Codes: 902
Rates: Normal rates are $25.00 for 65 hours of
connect time per month with extra time costing
$10.00 per 30 hours (2 a.m. to 7 a.m. is free).
Up to date pricing info is available on
^ our WWW pages.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: If the
ISKM is bought from isis (@$25.00), 3 .
the first month is free, otherwise if you <J
^*'0^ another local
source the first month will be given to you
^ at $15.00.
Signup Process: Users can call the office and
register for their accounts. Or if they are familiar
with a VT-100 capable communications program
(Z-term etc.), they can call out data line at 902-
496-9054 and log In as new and then follow the
onscreen prompts.
Contact Info:
1505 Barrington St. Suite 1501
Halifax, Nova Scotia
B3J 3K5, Canada
Voice: 902-429-4747
Fax: 902-429-9003
Human response: help@ra.isisnet.com
Automated response: info@ra.islsnet.com
Web Site: http://www.isisnet.com/
Magic Online Services Inc.
Area: Canada
Cities: The greater Toronto area (including
Agincourt, Ajax, Don Mills, Downsview, East
York, Ellesmere, Etobicoke, Mississauga, Metro
t
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
632 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Toronto, North York, Pickering, Rexdale,
Richmond Hill, Scarborough, Weston and York)
Area Codes: 416, 905
Rates: In NET-XX, XX indicates the number of
hours purchased per month. Prices are in
Canadian dollars and are subject to tax:
MONTHLY NET 30 $12.00 NET 60 $18.00 NET
90 $22.50—6 MONTH NET 30 $68.50 NET 60
$102.50 NET 90 $128.50—12 MONTH NET 30
$129.50 NET 60 $194.50 NET 90 $243.50—
Additional Time: NET 30 — $0. 50/hour NET
60— $0.38/hour NET 90— $0.31/hour— Small
Business, Corporate, and Student Account rates
are also available. Please call for details.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We will waive our
MagicNET one-time startup fee of $15.00. In
addition, we will offer ISKM owners a trial
access time of two FREE weeks OR 15 FREE
hours on MagicNET.
Signup Process: Simply email, phone, or fax us a
request for a MagicNET registration form and
we’ll send one to you. Rll It out and send It back
to us. After we’ve received your registration
form, we’ll fax or mail the configuration
instructions to you and set up your
account within two business days.
We'll call you to confirm your user id
and password, and you're on your way!
Contact Info:
260 Richmond Street West, Suite 206
Toronto, Ontario M5V 1W5
Canada
Voice: 416-591-6490
Fax: 416-591-6409
Human response: info@mail.magic.ca
Automated response: ftp.magic.ca
Web Site: http://www.magic.ca/
SaskTel
Area: Canada
Cities: All cities and towns In the Province of
Saskatchewan
Area Codes: 306
Rates: Contact the toll-free number to find out
about the ongoing promotions and packages
available! Following rates current as of April
1995: Rates for province wide Internet Access
Service: SaskTel Fact Sheet SaskTel Internet
Access Services SASKTEL INTERNET DIAL
ACCESS RATES Package Customer Monthly
Hours/month Peak Usage Off-Peak Usage
Service Type Location Rate Included rate/hour
rate/hour Connection (8:00am-ll:30pm)
(ll:30pm-8:00am) STANDARD: On-Net $19.95
10 $3.00 $1.00 $35.00 Off-Net $19.95 3 $6.00
$3.00 $35.00 HIGH USAGE: On-Net $39.95 20
$1.00 $1.00 $35.00 0ff-Net$39.95 7 $5.00
$2.50 $35.00 1 YEAR CONTRACT: On-Net
$399/year 20 $1.00 $1.00 $35.00 Off-Net $399/
year 7 $5.00 $2.50 $35.00 PROMOTION
(SaskTel will give dial access customers special
pricing for their first three months, when they
sign up by May 31, 1995.) On-Net $9.95 10
$3.00 $1.00 $35.00 Off-Net $9.95 3 $6.00
$3.00 $35.00 On-net rates apply to subscribers
located in Regina, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw,
Prince Albert, North Battleford, Swift Current,
Estevan, Weyburn, Yorkton, Melfort and their
free calling areas. Off-net rates apply to
subscribers located In all other locations. Off-
net customers do not incur long distance
charges. A yearly rate of $399.00 is available.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: Mail in
the front page of the manual from the
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
(version 3) and SaskTel will waive the
service connection charge of $35
(applicable to single user accounts only,
and to new subscribers).
Signup Process: Please call our
Inquiry and order line at 1-800-644-9225
for details.
Contact Info:
11th Floor Marketing
2121 Saskatchewan Drive
Regina, Saskatchewan, CANADA S4P 3Y2
Voice: 1-800-664-9205
Human response: staff@sasknet.sk.ca
Web Site: http://v/ww.sasknet.sk.ca/
iiNet Technologies Pty Ltd
Area: Australia
Cities: Perth and the South West region
Area Codes: -f61-9, +61-97
Rates: AU $25 startup and AU $25 per month.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: The startup cost
is waived for ISK owners.
Signup Process: Call our voice number at +61-9-
307-1183 to open an account. There is no
online registration available.
Appendix A ♦ Internet Starter Kit Providers 633
Contact Info:
PO Box 811
Hillarys 6025
Western Australia
Voice: +61-9*307-1183
Fax: +61-9-307-8414
Human response: iinet@iinet.net.au
Automated response:
Web Site: http://www.iinet.net.au/
Internode Professional
Access
Area: Australia
Cities: Adelaide, South Australia
Area Codes: 08
Rates: Normal dialup rates: AUS $25 joining fee/
AUS $550 per annum for PPP dialup user
access, some conditions apply. Permanent links
and corporate domain name services: P.O.A.
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We will waive the
normal Joining fee and provide you with
your first two weeks access free, to let
you try out our facilities with no
obligation. We're sure you'll find it the
fastest and best configured Internet
access facility in Adelaide!
Signup Process: Call Internode Professional
Access to register and obtain a user id and
password for your free two week trial. Credit
cards accepted for ongoing fees. Alternatively,
check out our web page at http : / /
WWW . adelaide .on.net for more details.
Contact Info:
SpaceNet GmbH
Area: Germany
Cities: Munich, Germany
Area Codes: +49 south
Rates: Startup fee: 90 DM; Monthly fees (we
charge volume, there is no limit or fee on online
time): Normal: 55 DM, get 3 MB for free, every
additional MB is 7,80 DM. Office: 290 DM, get
40 MB for free, every additional MB is 5,50 DM.
Office II: 800 DM, get 150 MB for free, every
additional MB is 4,50 DM. Above 300 MB: Ask!
Promotion for Starter Kit Owners: We’ll waive the
starting fee of 90 DM! Additionally, every Starter
Kit user will get free access for the first month.
So you can try SpaceNet without any fees at all.
Signup Process: Get our info material from
ftp. space.net ; info/*. ps, print it, fill it
out and return it via fax or snail mail. You will
hear from us the next day (worst case).
Contact Info:
Frankfurter Ring 193a
D-80807 Munchen
Germany
Voice: +49 89 324683-0
Fax: +49 89 324683-51
Human response: info@space.net
Web Site: http://www.space.net/
PO Box 69
Daw Park, SA 5041 Australia
Voice: +61-8-373-1020
Fax: +61-8-373-4911
Human response: sales@adelaide.on.net
Automated response: help@adelaide.on.net
<
Web Site: http://www.adelaide.on.net
Internet
Starter Kit
Providers
Appendix
Providers of
Commercial Internet
Access
Although we have put together a substantial list of Internet providers specifi-
cally for Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (see appendix A), you still may not find
the one that best suits your needs. If not, look through the providers in the
following list to see if there is one that you want to contact. You will find all the
information you need to contact these providers on your own.
Remember that there will not be custom MacTCP Prep files on the disk for these
providers, so you must call or email to get the necessary configuration informa-
tion. Most are more than happy to help you.
This list is the Providers of Commercial Internet Access (POCIA) Directory
TEXT version taken directly from the net itself. Note that it is copyrighted
material which we have included with permission from the Celestin Company.
Our thanks go to Celestin for providing this excellent resource for the net
community.
636 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Updated May 1995
Copyright 1994-1995 by Celestin Company, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.
The information in this directory is provided as is and without any expressed or
implied warranties, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of
merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. You may use the informa-
tion in this directory for noncommercial purposes only. Contact us if you wish
to use the directory for a commercial purpose. For example, if you would like to
post this file on a public BBS, you may do so. However, if you would like to
reproduce this file (in whole or in part) in a newsletter, book, article, or other
commercial media, please contact us.
All of the information in this directory was supplied to Celestin Company
directly by the service providers and is subject to change without notice.
Celestin Company does not endorse any of the providers in this directory. If you
do not see a provider listed for your area, please do not ask us about it, as we
only know about providers in this directory. This directory is brought to you as
a public service. Celestin Company does not receive any compensation from the
providers listed here. Since Internet service providers come and go, and fre-
quently change their offers, we strongly urge you to contact them for additional
information and/or restrictions.
The latest version of this document is available at the following location:
ftp://ftp.teleport.com/vendors/cci/pocia/pocia.txt
You may also retrieve the latest copy (as well as additional information on
Celestin Company and its products) using email. For information on how this
works, send a blank message to: cci(aolympus.net
If you have web access, try http://www.teleport.com/~cci/ for the hypertext
version of this list, which includes addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers,
email addresses, and pricing.
If you would rather receive the directory on a disk, send us a check for $10 ($15
if you do not live in the U.S. or Canada) and specify Mac or Windows. In return,
we will send you a disk which includes the complete hypertext version of the
directory, along with a browser to make searching for Internet providers easy.
Our address is:
POCIA Directory
Celestin Company
1152 Hastings Avenue
Port Townsend, WA 98368
United States of America
Voice: 360 385 3767
Fax: 360 385 3586
Email: celestin@olympus.net
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 637
Domestic
Below is a listing of Internet service providers in the U.S. and Canada, sorted by
area code. Fields are area code, service provider name, voice phone number, and
email address for more information.
Free Service Providers
Name
Phone
Email
Cyberspace (shell,slip,ppp)
modem -> 515 945 7000
info@cyberspace.com
Free.org (shell,slip,ppp)
modem -> 715 743 1600
info@free.org
Free.I.Net (must dial via AT&T)
modem -> 801 471 2266
info@free.i.net
SLIPNET (shell, slip,ppp)
modem -> 217 792 2777
info@slip.net
Nationwide Service Providers
Name
Phone
Email
•-3
lU
Providers of
ANS
703 758 7700
info@ans.net
a
<
Commercidl
Internet
Access
Global Connect, Inc.
804 229 4484
info@gc.net
Information Access Technologies (Holonet)
510 704 0160
info@hoIonet.net
NETCOM On-Line Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
Network 99, Inc.
800 NET 99IP
net99@cluster.mcs.net
Performance Systems International
800 827 7482
aII-info@psi.com
SprintLink - Nationwide 56K - 45M access
800 817 7755
info@sprint.net
638 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Toll-Free Service Providers
Name
Phone
Email
Allied Access Inc.
618 684 2255
sales@intrnet.net
American Information Systems, Inc.
708 413 8400
info@ais.net
Association for Computing Machinery
817 776 6876
account-info@acm.org
CICNet, Inc.
313 998 6103
info@cic.net
Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
303 296 8202
info@csn.org
DataBank, Inc.
913 842 6699
info@databank.com
Global Connect, Inc.
804 229 4484
info@gc.net
Internet Express
719 592 1240
info@usa.net
Mnematics, Incorporated
914 359 4546
service@mne.com
Msen, Inc.
313 998 4562
info@msen.com
NeoSoft, Inc.
713 684 5969
info@neosof t . com
New Mexico Technet, Inc.
505 345 6555
granoff@technet.nm.org
Pacific Rim Network, Inc.
360 650 0442
info@pacificrim.net
Prometheus Information Network
Group Inc.
404 399 1670
info@ping.com
Rocky Mountain Internet
800 900 7644
info@rmii.com
Synergy Communications, Inc.
800 345 9669
info@synergy.net
WLN
800 342 5956
info@wln.com
Regional Service Providers
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
201
Carroll-Net
201 488 1332
info@carroll.com
201
The Connection
201 435 4414
info@cnct.com
201
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
201
INTAC Access Corporation
800 504 6822
info@intac.com
201
Intercom Online
212 714 7183
info@intercom.com
201
Internet For 'U'
800 NET WAYl
info@ifu.net
201
Internet Online Services
x226 -> 201 928 1000
help@ios.com
201
Mordor International BBS
201 433 4222
ritz@mordor.com
201
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 639
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
201
New York Net
718 776 6811
sales@new-york.net
201
NIC - Neighborhood
Internet Connection
201 934 1445
info@nic.com
202
CAPCON Library Netu^ork
202 331 5771
info@capcon.net
202
Charm.Net
410 558 3900
info@charm.net
202
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
202
Genuine Computing
Resources
703 878 4680
info@gcr.com
202
Internet Online, Inc.
301 652 4468
info@intr.net
202
Interpath
800 849 6305
info@interpath.net
202
LaserNet
703 591 4232
info@laser.net
202
Quantum Networking
Solutions, Inc.
805 538 2028
info@qnet.com
202
US Net, Incorporated
301 572 5926
info@us.net
203
Connix: Connecticut
Internet Exchange
203 349 7059
inf o@connix . com
203
Futuris Networks, Inc.
203 359 8868
info@futuris.net
203
1-2000, Inc.
516 867 6379
info@i-2000.com
203
Paradigm
Communications, Inc.
203 250 7397
info@pcnet.com
205
Community Internet
Connect, Inc.
205 722 0199
info@cici.com
205
HiWAAY Information
Services
205 533 3131
info@HiWAAY.net
205
interQuest, Inc.
205 464 8280
info@iquest.com
205
Scott Network
Services, Inc.
205 987 5889
info@scott.net
206
Eskimo North
206 367 7457
nanook@eskimo.com
206
Internet Express
719 5921240
info@usa.net
206
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
206
Northwest Nexus, Inc.
206 455 3505
info@nwnexus.wa.com
206
Pacifier Computers
206 254 3886
account@pacifier.com
206
Seanet Online Services
206 343 7828
info@seanet.com
^ Providers of
^ Commercial
^ Internet
^ Access
continues
640 Internet Stnrter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
206
SenseMedia
408 335 9400
sm@picosof.com
206
Structured Network
Systems, Inc.
503 656 3530
info@structured.net
206
Teleport, Inc.
503 223 4245
info@teleport.com
206
Transport Logic
503 243 1940
salcs@transport.com
206
WLN
800 342 5956
info@wln.com
207
Agate Internet Services
207 947 8248
ais@agate.net
208
Micron Internet Services
208 368 5400
sales@micron.net
208
Minnesota Regional
Network
612 342 2570
info@mr.net
208
NICOH Net
208 233 5802
info@nicoh.com
208
Primenet
602 8701010
info@primenet.com
208
Transport Logic
503 243 1940
sales@transport.com
209
Cybergate Information
Services
209 486 4283
cis@cybergate.com
209
West Coast Online
707 586 3060
info@calon.com
210
1-Link Ltd
800 ILINK 99
info@i-link.net
212
Altemet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
212
Blythe Systems
212 226 7171
infodesk@blythe.org
212
Creative Data
Consultants (SILLY.COM)
718 229 0489
info@silly.com
212
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
212
Echo Communications
Group
212 255 3839
info@echonyc.com
212
escape.com - Kazan Corp
212 888 8780
info@escape.com
212
1-2000, Inc.
516 867 6379
info@i-2000.com
212
Ingress Communications Inc.
212 679 2838
info@ingress.com
212
INTAC Access Corporation
800 504 6822
info@intac.com
212
Intercom Online
212 714 7183
info@intercom.com
212
Internet For 'U'
800 NET WAYl
info@ifu.net
212
Internet Online Services
x226 -> 201 928 1000
help@ios.com
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 641
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
212
Interport
Communications Corp.
212 9891128
info@interport.net
212
Mordor International BBS
201 433 4222
ritz@mordor.com
212
Mnematics, Incorporated
914 359 4546
service@mne.com
212
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
212
New York Net
718 776 6811
sales@new-york.net
212
NY WEBB, Inc.
800 458 4660
wayne@webb.com
212
Phantom Access
Technologies, Inc.
212 989 2418
bruce@phantom.com
212
The Pipeline Network
212 267 2626
info-info@pipeline.com
213
Abode Computer Service
818 287 5115
eric@abode.ttank.com
213
Delta Internet Services
714 778 0370
info@deltanet.com
213
DigiLink Network Services
310 542 7421
info@digilink.net
213
DirectNet
213 383 3144
info@directnet.com
213
EarthLink Network, Inc.
213 644 9500
info@earthlink.net
213
Electriciti
619 338 9000
info@powergrid.electriciti.com
213
KAIWAN Internet
714 638 2139
info@kaiwan.com
213
Primenet
602 8701010
info@primenet.com
213
ViaNet Communications
415 903 2242
info@via.net
214
Alternet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
214
DFW Internet Services, Inc.
817 332 5116
info@dfw.net
214
I-Link Ltd
800 ILINK 99
info@i-link.net
214
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
214
Texas Metronet, Inc.
214 705 2900
info@metronet.com
215
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
215
FishNet
610 337 9994
info@pond.com
215
Microserve Information
Systems
717 779 4430
info@microserve.com
215
Network Analysis Group
800 624 9240
nag@good . freed om .net
215
Oasis Telecommunications,
Inc.
610 439 8560
staff@oasis.ot.com
215
YOU TOOLS Corporation
610 954 5910
info@you tools.com
^ Providers of
g{ Commercial
^ Internet
^ Access
continues
642 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
216
APK Public Access
UNP Site
216 481 9436
info@wariat.org
216
Branch Information
Ser\dces
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
216
Exchange Network
Services, Inc.
216 261 4593
info@en.com
216
OARnet (corporate
clients only)
614 728 8100
info@oar.net
216
New Age
Consulting Service
216 524 3162
damin@nacs.net
217
Allied Access Inc.
618 684 2255
sales@intrnet.net
217
Sol Tec, Inc.
317 920 ISOL
info@soltec.com
218
Red River Net
701 232 2227
info@rrnet.com
301
Charm.Net
410 558 3900
info@charm.net
301
Clark Internet Ser\dces,
Inc. ClarkNet
410 995 0691
info@clark.net
301
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
301
FredNet
301 698 2396
info@fred.net
301
Genuine Computing
Resources
703 878 4680
info@gcr.com
301
Internet Online, Inc.
301 652 4468
info@intr.net
301
LaserNet
703 591 4232
info@laser.net
301
Quantum Networking
Solutions, Inc.
805 538 2028
info@qnet.com
301
SURAnet
301 982 4600
marketing@sura.net
301
US Net, Incorporated
301 572 5926
info@us.net
302
SSNet, Inc.
302 378 1386
info@ssnet.com
303
Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
303 296 8202
info@csn.org
303
CSDC, Inc.
303 665 8053
support@ares.csd.net
303
ENVISIONET, Inc.
303 770 2408
i n f o@envisionet. net
303
EZLink Internet Access
970 482 0807
ezadmin@ezlink.com
303
Indra's Net, Inc.
303 546 9151
info@indra.com
303
Internet Express
719 592 1240
info@usa.net
Appendix B # Providers of Commercial Internet Access 643
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
303
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
303
New Mexico Technet, Inc.
505 345 6555
granoff@technet.nm.org
303
Rocky Mountain Internet
800 900 7644
info@rmii.com
303
Stonehenge Internet
Communications
800 RUN INET
info@henge.com
305
Acquired Knowledge
Systems Inc.
305 525 2574
info@aksi.net
305
CyberGate, Inc.
305 428 4283
sales@gate.net
305
InteleCom Data
Systems, Inc.
401 885 6855
info@ids.net
305
PSS InterNet Services
800 463 8499
support@america.com
305
SatelNET
Communications
305 434 8738
admin@satelnet.org
307
wyoming.com
307 332 3030
info@wyoming.com
308
Synergy
Communications, Inc.
800 345 9669
info@synergy.net
Providers of
ti
Commercial
310
Abode Computer Service
818 287 5115
eric@abode.ttank.com
*-r
<
Internet
Access
310
Cloverleaf Communications
714 895 3075
sales@cloverleaf.com
310
Delta Internet Services
714 778 0370
info@deltanet.com
310
DigiLink Network Services
310 542 7421
info@digilink.net
310
EarthLink Network, Inc.
213 644 9500
info@earthlink.net
310
KAIWAN Internet
714 638 2139
info@kaiwan.com
310
Lightside, Inc.
818 858 9261
info@lightside.com
310
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
310
ViaNet Communications
415 903 2242
info@via.net
312
American Information
Systems, Inc.
708 413 8400
info@ais.net
312
CICNet, Inc.
313 998 6103
info@cic.net
312
InterAccess Co.
800 967 1580
info@interaccess.com
312
MCSNet
312 248 8649
info@mcs.net
312
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Ser\dces
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
continues
644 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
312
Open Business
Systems, Inc.
708 250 0260
info@obs.net
312
Ripco
Communications, Inc.
312 477 6210
info@ripco.com
312
Tezcatlipoca, Inc.
312 850 0181
info@tezcat.com
312
Worldwide Access
708 367 1870
info@wwa.com
313
Branch Information
Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
313
CICNet, Inc.
313 998 6103
info@cic.net
313
ICNET / Innovative
Concepts
313 998 0090
info@ic.net
313
Isthmus Corporation
313 973 2100
info@izzy.net
313
Msen, Inc.
313 998 4562
info@msen.com
314
Allied Access Inc.
618 684 2255
sales@intmet.net
314
NeoSoft, Inc.
713 684 5969
info@neosoft.com
314
ThoughtPort, Inc.
314 474 6870
info@thoughtport.com
315
ServiceTech Inc. Cyber-Link
716 546 6908
dam@cyberl.servtech.com
316
SouthWind Internet
Access, Inc.
316 263 7963
inf o@sou th wind . net
317
Branch Information Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
317
HoIliCom Internet Services
317 883 4500
cale@holli.com
317
IQuest Network Services
317 259 5050
info@iquest.net
317
Metropolitan Data
Networks Limited
317 449 0539
info@mdn.com
317
Net Direct
317 251 5252
kat@inetdirect.net
317
Sol Tec, Inc.
317 9201SOL
info@soltec.com
334
Scott Network Services, Inc.
205 987 5889
info@scott.net
334
WSNetwork Com-
munications Services, Inc.
334 263 5505
custserv@wsnet.com
360
Northwest CommLink
360 336 0103
info@nwcl.net
360
Pacific Rim Network, Inc.
360 650 0442
info@pacificrim.net
360
Skagit On-Line Services
360 755 0190
info@sos.net
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 645
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
360
Townsend
Communications, Inc.
360 385 0464
info@olympus.net
360
Whidbey Connections, Inc.
360 6781070
info@whidbey.net
360
WLN
800 342 5956
info@wln.com
401
InteleCom Data
Systems, Inc.
401 885 6855
info@ids.net
401
The Internet
Connection, Inc.
508 261 0383
info@ici.net
402
Internet Nebraska
402 434 8680
info@inetnebr.com
402
Synergy
Communications, Inc.
800 345 9669
info@synergy.net
403
CCI Networks
403 450 6787
info@ccinet.ab.ca
403
Debug Computer Services
403 248 5798
root@debug.cuc.ab.ca
403
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
404
Internet Atlanta
404 410 9000
info@atlanta.com
404
Mindspring
404 888 0725
info@mindspring.com
1.^ Providers of
P Commercial
404
NETCOM On-Line
^ Internet
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
^ Access
404
Prometheus Information
Network Group Inc.
404 399 1670
info@ping.com
405
Internet Oklahoma
405 721 1580
info@ionet.net
405
Questar Net\vork Services
405 848 3228
info@qns.net
406
Montana Online
406 721 4952
info@montana.com
407
CyberGate, Inc.
305 428 4283
sales@gate.net
407
The EmiNet Domain
407 731 0222
info@emi.net
407
Florida Online
407 635 8888
info@digital.net
407
InteleCom Data Systems, Inc.
401 885 6855
info@ids.net
407
InternetU
407 952 8487
info@iu.net
407
MagicNet, Inc.
407 657 2202
info@magicnet.net
407
MetroLink Internet Services
407 726 6707
tbatchel@met.net
continues
646 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
407
PSS InterNet Services
800 463 8499
support@america.com
408
Aimnet Information
Services
408 257 0900
info@aimnet.com
408
Alternet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
408
BTR Communications
Company
415 966 1429
support@btr.com
408
Direct Net Access
Incorporated
510 649 6110
support@dnai.com
408
The Duck Pond
modem ->
Public Unix
408 249 9630
postmaster@kfu.com
408
Electriciti
619 338 9000
info@powergrid.electriciti.com
408
Infoserv Connections
408 335 5600
root@infoserv.com
408
InterNex Information
Services, Inc.
415 473 3060
info@intemex.net
408
ISP Networks
408 653 0100
info@isp.net
408
MediaCity World
415 321 6800
info@MediaCity.com
408
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
408
NetGate Communications
408 565 9601
sales@netgate.net
408
Scruz-Net
408 457 5050
info@scruz.net
408
SenseMedia
408 335 9400
sm@picosof.com
408
South Valley Internet
408 683 4533
info@garlic.com
408
West Coast Online
707 586 3060
info@calon.com
408
zNET
619 755 7772
info@znet.com
408
Zocalo Engineering
510 540 8000
info@zocalo.net
409
Internet Connect
Services, Inc.
512 572 9987
info@icsi.net
410
CAPCON Library Network
202 331 5771
info@capcon.net
410
Charm.Net
410 558 3900
info@charm.net
410
Clark Internet Services,
Inc. ClarkNet
410 995 0691
info@clark.net
410
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
410
jaguNET Access Services
410 931 3157
info@jagunet.com
410
Softaid Internet Services Inc.
410 290 7763
sales@softaid.net
410
US Net, Incorporated
301 572 5926
info@us.net
Appendix B # Providers of Commercial Internet Access 647
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
412
Telerama Public
Access Internet
412 481 3505
info@telerama.lm.com
413
Mallard Electronics, Inc.
413 732 0214
gheacock@map.com
413
MediaCity World
415 321 6800
info@MediaCity.com
413
ShaysNet.COM
413 772 3774
staff@shaysnet.com
414
Exec-PC, Inc.
414 789 4200
info@execpc.com
414
FullFeed Communications
608 246 4239
info@fullfeed.com
414
MIX Communications
414 351 1868
info@mixcom.com
414
NetNet, Inc.
414 4991339
info@netnet.net
415
Aimnet Information
Services
408 257 0900
info@aimnet.com
415
Altemet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
415
BTR Communications
Company
415 966 1429
support@btr.com
415
Community Connexion -
NEXUS-Berkeley
510 549 1383
info@c2.org
Providers of
415
Direct Net Access
Jj Commercial
Incorporated
510 649 6110
support@dnai.com
^ Internet
^ Access
415
InterNex Information
Services, Inc.
415 473 3060
info@internex.net
415
LanMinds, Inc.
510 843 6389
info@lanminds.com
415
LineX Communications
415 4551650
info@linex.com
415
MediaCity World
415 321 6800
info@MediaCity.com
415
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Ser\dces
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
415
NetGate Communications
408 565 9601
sales@netgate.net
415
QuakeNet
415 655 6607
info@quake.net
415
SLIPNET
415 281 3132
info@slip.net
415
ViaNet Communications
415 903 2242
info@via.net
415
The WELL
415 332 4335
info@well.com
415
West Coast Online
707 586 3060
info@calon.com
415
zNET
619 755 7772
info@znet.com
415
Zocalo Engineering
510 540 8000
info@zocalo.net
continues
648 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
416
HookUp Communications
905 847 8000
info@hookup.net
416
InterLog Internet Services
416 975 2655
intemet@interlog.com
416
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
418
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
419
Branch Information Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
419
OARnet (corporate
clients only)
614 728 8100
info@oar.net
501
Cloverleaf Technologies
903 832 1367
helpdesk@clover.cleaf.com
501
Sibylline, Inc.
501 521 4660
info@sibylline.com
502
IgLou Internet Services
800 436 4456
info@iglou.com
503
Altemet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
503
Data Researcli Group, Inc.
503 465 3282
info@ordata.com
503
Europa
503 222 9508
info@europa.com
503
Hevanet Communications
503 228 3520
info@hevanet.com
503
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
503
Open Door Networks, Inc.
503 488 4127
info@opendoor.com
503
RainDrop Laboraties/
Agora
503 293 1772
info@agora.rdrop.com
503
Structured Network
Systems, Inc.
503 656 3530
info@structured.net
503
Teleport, Inc.
503 223 4245
info@teleport.com
503
Transport Logic
503 243 1940
sales@transport.com
503
WLN
800 342 5956
info@wln.com
504
Communique Inc.
504 527 6200
info@communique.net
504
I-Link Ltd
800 ILINK 99
info@i-link.net
504
NeoSoft, Inc.
713 684 5969
info@neosoft.com
505
Computer Systems
Consulting
505 984 0085
info@spy.org
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 649
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
505
Internet Express
719 592 1240
info@usa.net
505
New Mexico Technet, Inc.
505 345 6555
granoff@technet.nm.org
505
Southwest Cyberport
505 271 0009
info@swcp.com
505
ZyNet Southwest
505 343 8846
zycor@zynet.com
506
Agate Internet Services
207 947 8248
ais@agate.net
507
Internet Connections, Inc.
507 625 7320
info@ic.mankato.mn.us
507
Millennium
Communications, Inc.
612 338 5509
info@millcomm.com
507
Minnesota Regional
Network
612 342 2570
info@mr.net
508
The Destek Group, Inc.
603 635 3857
inquire@destek.net
508
FOURnet Information
Network
508 291 2900
info@four.net
508
The Internet Access
Company (TIAC)
617 276 7200
info@tiac.net
508
The Internet
Connection, Inc.
508 261 0383
info@ici.net
Providers of
508
intuitive information, inc.
508 342 1100
info@iii.net
^ Commercial
^ Internet
508
North Shore Access
617 593 3110
info@shore.net
^ Access
508
Pioneer Global
Telecommunications, Inc.
617 375 0200
info@pn.com
508
SCHUNIX
508 853 0258
schu@schunix.com
508
StarNet
508 922 8238
info@venus.star.net
508
TerraNet, Inc.
617 450 9000
info@terra.net
508
UltraNet
Communications, Inc.
508 229 8400
info@ultra.net.com
508
The World
617 739 0202
info@world.std.com
508
Wrentham Internet Ser\dces
508 384 1404
info@riva.com
508
Wilder Systems, Inc.
617933 8810
info@id.wing.net
509
Internet On-Ramp
509 927 7267
info@on-ramp.ior.com
509
Transport Logic
503 243 1940
sales@transport.com
509
WLN
800 342 5956
info@wln.com
continues
650 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area Name Phone Email
Code
510
Aimnet Information
Services
510
Alternet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
510
BTR Communications
Company
510
Community ConneXion-
NEXUS-Berkeley
510
Direct Net Access
Incorporated
510
InterNex Information
Services, Inc.
510
LanMinds, Inc.
510
LineX Communications
510
MediaCity World
510
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
510
SLIPNET
510
West Coast Online
510
Zocalo Engineering
512
©sig.net
512
I-Link Ltd
512
Illuminati Online
512
Internet Connect
Services, Inc.
512
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Ser\dces
512
Real /Time Communications
512
Zilker Internet Park, Inc.
513
The Dayton Network
Access Company
513
IgLou Internet Services
513
Internet Access Cincinnati
513
Local Internet Gateway Co.
513
OARnet (corporate
clients only)
408 257 0900
info@aimnet.com
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
415 966 1429
support@btr.com
510 549 1383
info@c2.org
510 649 6110
support@dnai.com
415 473 3060
510 843 6389
415 455 1650
415 321 6800
info@internex.net
info@lanminds.com
info@linex.com
info@MediaCity.com
408 554 8649
415 281 3132
707 586 3060
510 540 8000
info@netcom.com
info@slip.net
info@calon.com
info@zocalo.net
512 306 0700
800 ILINK 99
512 462 0999
sales@aus.sig.net
info@i-link.net
info@io.com
512 572 9987
info@icsi.net
408 554 8649
512 451 0046
512 206 3850
info@netcom.com
info@realtime.net
info@zilker.net
513 237 6868
800 436 4456
513 887 8877
510 503 9227
info@dnaco.net
info@iglou.com
info@iac.net
sdw@lig.net
614 728 8100
info@oar.net
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 651
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
514
CiteNet Telecom Inc.
514 721 1351
info@citenet.net
514
Communication
Accessibles Montreal
514 288 2581
info@cam.org
514
Communications
Inter-Acces
514 367 0002
info@interax.net
514
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
515
Synergy
Communications, Inc.
800 345 9669
info@synergy.net
516
Creative Data
Consultants (SILLY.COM)
718 229 0489
info@silly.com
516
Echo Communications
Group
212 255 3839
info@echonyc.com
516
1-2000, Inc.
516 867 6379
info@i-2000.com
516
LI Net, Inc.
516 4761168
info@li.net
516
Long Island
Information, Inc.
516 294 0124
info@liii.com
516
Network Internet
Services
516 543 0234
info@netusa.net
516
Phantom Access
Technologies, Inc.
212 989 2418
bruce@phantom.com
•T3
p
a
Providers of
Commercial
Internet
516
The Pipeline Network
212 267 2626
info-info@pipeline.com
<
Access
517
Msen, Inc.
313 998 4562
info@msen.com
517
Branch Information Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
518
Wizvax Communications
518 273 4325
i nfo@ w iz vax. com
519
HookUp Communications
905 847 8000
info@hookup.net
519
MGL Systems Computer
Technologies Inc.
519 651 2713
info@mgl.ca
519
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
520
Opus One
602 324 0494
sales@opusl .com
520
RTD Systems &
Networking, Inc.
602 318 0696
info@rtd.com
602
Crossroads Communications
602 813 9040
crossroads@xroads.com
continues
652 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
602
Internet Direct, Inc.
602 274 0100
info@indirect.com
602
Internet Express
719 592 1240
info@usa.net
602
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
602
New Mexico Technet, Inc.
505 345 6555
granoff@technet.nm.org
602
Opus One
602 324 0494
sales@opusl.com
602
Primenet
602 870 1010
info@primenet.com
602
RTD Systems &
Networking, Inc.
602 318 0696
info@rtd.com
602
Systems Solutions Inc.
602 955 5566
support@syspac.com
603
Agate Internet Services
207 947 8248
ais@agate.net
603
The Destek Group, Inc.
603 635 3857
inquire@destek.net
603
MV Communications, Inc.
603 429 2223
info@mv.mv.com
603
NETIS Public
Access Internet
603 4371811
epoole@leotech.mv.com
604
AMT Solutions Group, Inc.
Island Net
604 727 6030
info@islandnet.com
604
Mind Link!
604 534 5663
info@mindlink.bc.ca
604
Okanagan Internet Junction
604 549 1036
info@junction.net
604
Sunshine Net, Inc.
604 886 4120
admin@sunshine.net
604
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
606
IgLou Internet Services
800 436 4456
info@iglou.com
606
Internet Access Cincinnati
513 887 8877
info@iac.net
608
FullFeed Communications
608 246 4239
info@fullfeed.com
609
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
609
Internet For 'U'
800 NET WAYl
info@ifu.net
609
K2NE Software
609 893 0673
vince-q@k2nesoft.com
609
New Jersey Computer
Connection
609 896 2799
info@pluto.njcc.com
610
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
610
FishNet
610 337 9994
info@pond.com
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 653
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
610
Microserve Information
Systems
717 779 4430
info@microserve.com
610
Network Analysis Group
800 624 9240
nag@good.freedom.net
610
SSNet, Inc.
302 378 1386
info@ssnet.com
610
Oasis
Telecommunications, Inc.
610 439 8560
staff@oasis.ot.com
610
YOU TOOLS Corporation
610 954 5910
info@youtools.com
612
Millennium
Communications, Inc.
612 338 5509
info@millcomm.com
612
Minnesota Regional
Network
612 342 2570
info@mr.net
612
StarNet
Communications, Inc.
612 941 9177
info@winternet.com
612
Synergy
Communications, Inc.
800 345 9669
info@synergy.net
613
Information Gateway
Services
613 592 5619
info@igs.net
613
HookUp Communications
905 847 8000
info@hookup.net
613
o: / / info, web
613 225 3354
kevin@magi.com
613
UUNET Canada, Inc.
416 368 6621
info@uunet.ca
614
Branch Information Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
614
Internet Access Cincinnati
513 887 8877
info@iac.net
614
OARnet (corporate
clients only)
614 728 8100
info@oar.net
615
ERC, Inc. / The Edge
615 455 9915
staff@edge.ercnet.com
615
GoldSword Systems
615 691 6498
info@goldsword.com
615
ISDN-Net Inc
615 377 7672
jdunlap@rex.isdn.net
615
The Telalink Corporation
615 321 9100
sales@telalink.net
615
The Tri-Cities Connection
615 378 5355
info@tricon.net
616
Branch Information Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
616
Msen, Inc.
313 998 4562
info@msen.com
617
Altemet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
"0
a
<
Providers of
Commercial
Internet
Access
continues
654 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
617
The Internet Access
Company (TIAC)
617 276 7200
info@tiac.net
617
intuitive information, inc.
508 3421100
info@iii.net
617
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
617
North Shore Access
617 593 3110
info@shore.net
617
Pioneer Global
Telecommunications, Inc.
617 375 0200
info@pn.com
617
TerraNet, Inc.
617450 9000
info@terra.net
617
UltraNet
Communications, Inc.
508 229 8400
info@ultra.net.com
617
The World
617 739 0202
info@world.std.com
617
Wilder Systems, Inc.
617 933 8810
info@id.wing.net
618
Allied Access Inc.
618 684 2255
sales@intrnet.net
619
CONNECTnet Internet
Network Services
619 450 0254
info@connectnet.com
619
CTS Network Services
619 637 3637
info@cts.com
619
The Cyberspace Station
619 634 2894
info@cyber.net
619
Electriciti
619 338 9000
info@powergrid.electriciti.com
619
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
701
Red River Net
701 232 2227
info@rrnet.com
702
©wizard. com
702 871 4461
info@wizard .com
702
Great Basin Internet Services
702 829 2244
inf o@grea tbasin . com
702
InterMind
702 878 6111
support@terminus.intermind.net
702
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
702
Sierra-Net
702 831 3353
giles@sierra.net
703
Altemet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
703
CAPCON Library Netv\^ork
202 331 5771
info@capcon.net
703
Charm.Net
410 558 3900
info@charm.net
703
Clark Internet Services, Inc.
ClarkNet
410 995 0691
info@clark.net
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 655
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
703
DataBank, Inc.
913 842 6699
info@databank.com
703
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
703
Genuine Computing
Resources
703 878 4680
info@gcr.com
703
Internet Online, Inc.
301 652 4468
info@intr.net
703
Interpath
800 849 6305
info@interpath.net
703
LaserNet
703 591 4232
info@laser.net
703
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
703
Quantum Networking
Solutions, Inc.
805 538 2028
info@qnet.com
703
US Net, Incorporated
301 572 5926
info@us.net
704
Interpath
800 849 6305
info@interpath.net
704
SunBelt.Net
803 328 1500
info@sunbelt.net
704
Vnet Internet Access
704 334 3282
info@vnet.net
705
Mindemoya Computing
705 523 0243
info@mcd.on.ca
706
Internet Atlanta
404 410 9000
info@atlanta.com
PartV
Providers of
Commercial
706
MindSpring
404 888 0725
info@mindspring.com
Internet
Access
707
West Coast Online
707 586 3060
info@calon.com
707
Zocalo Engineering
510 540 8000
info@zocalo.net
708
American Information
Systems, Inc.
708 413 8400
info@ais.net
708
CICNet, Inc.
313 998 6103
info@cic.net
708
InterAccess Co.
800 967 1580
info@interaccess.com
708
MCSNet
312 248 8649
info@mcs.net
708
Open Business
Systems, Inc.
708 250 0260
info@obs.net
708
Ripco Communications, Inc.
312 477 6210
info@ripco.com
708
Tezcatlipoca, Inc.
312 850 0181
info@tezcat.com
708
Worldwide Access
708 367 1870
info@wwa.com
712
Synergy
Communications, Inc.
800 345 9669
info@synergy.net
cofitimies
656 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
713
Alternet (UUNET
Technologies, Inc.)
703 204 8000
info@alter.net
713
The Black Box
713 480 2684
info@blkbox.com
713
ELECTROTEX, Inc.
713 526 3456
info@electrotex.com
713
I-Link Ltd
800 ILINK 99
info@i-link.net
713
Internet Connect
Services, Inc.
512 572 9987
info@icsi.net
713
NeoSoft, Inc.
713 684 5969
info@neosoft.com
713
USiS
713 682 1666
admin@usis.com
714
Qoverleaf Communications
714 895 3075
sales@cloverleaf.com
714
Delta Internet Services
714 778 0370
info@deltanet.com
714
DigiLink Network Services
310 542 7421
info@digilink.net
714
EarthLink Network, Inc.
213 644 9500
info@earthlink.net
714
Electriciti
619 338 9000
info@powergrid.electriciti.com
714
KAIWAN Internet
714 638 2139
info@kaiwan.com
714
Lightside, Inc.
818 858 9261
info@lightside.com
714
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
715
FullFeed Communications
608 246 4239
info@fullfeed.com
716
E-Znet, Inc.
716 262 2485
716
Moran Communications
716 639 1254
info@moran.com
716
ServiceTech Inc. Cyber-Link
716 546 6908
dam@cyberl .ser\'tech.com
717
Microserve
Information Systems
717 779 4430
info@microser\^e.com
717
Oasis
Telecommunications, Inc.
610 439 8560
staff@oasis.ot.com
717
YOU TOOLS Corporation
610 954 5910
info@youtools.com
718
Blythe Systems
212 226 7171
infodesk@blythe.org
718
Creative Data
Consultants (SILLY.COM)
718 229 0489
info@silly.com
718
escape.com - Kazan Corp
212 888 8780
info@escape.com
718
1-2000, Inc.
516 867 6379
info@i-2000.com
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 657
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
718
Ingress
Communications Inc.
212 679 2838
info@ingress.com
718
Intercom Online
212 714 7183
info@intercom.com
718
Interport
Communications Corp.
212 9891128
info@interport.net
718
Mnematics, Incorporated
914 359 4546
service@mne.com
718
Mordor International BBS
201 433 4222
ritz@mordor.com
718
Phantom Access
Technologies, Inc.
212 989 2418
bruce@phantom.com
718
The Pipeline Network
212 267 2626
info-info@pipeline.com
719
Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
303 296 8202
info@csn.org
719
Internet Express
719 592 1240
info@usa.net
719
Old Colorado City
Communications
719 528 5849
thefox@oldcolo.com
719
Rocky Mountain Internet
800 900 7644
info@rmii.com
801
DataBank, Inc.
913 842 6699
info@databank.com
801
Infonaut Communication
Services
801 370 3068
info@infonaut.com
Providers of
801
Internet Direct, Inc.
801 578 0300
info@indirect.com
Commercial
Internet
801
Internet Technology'
Systems (I.T.S.)
801 375 0538
admin@itsnet.com
<
Access
801
XMission
801 539 0852
support@xmission.com
803
A World of Difference, Inc.
803 769 4488
info@awod.com
803
Global Vision Inc.
803 241 0901
info@globalvision.net
803
In ter path
800 849 6305
info@interpath.net
803
SIMS, Inc.
803 762 4956
info@sims.net
803
SunBelt.Net
803 328 1500
info@sunbelt.net
804
Widomaker
Communication Service
804 253 7621
bloyall@widowmaker.com
805
The Central Connection
818 735 3000
info@centcon.com
805
EarthLink Network, Inc.
213 644 9500
info@earthlink.net
805
KAIWAN Internet
714 638 2139
info@kaiwan.com
continues
658 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
805
Quantum Networking
Solutions, Inc.
805 538 2028
info@qnet.com
805
Regional Alliance for
Info Networking
805 967 7246
info@rain.org
808
Hawaii OnLine
808 533 6981
support@aloha.net
808
LavaNet, Inc.
808 545 5282
info@lava.net
808
Pacific Information
Exchange, Inc.
808 596 7494
info@pixi.com
810
Branch Information
Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
810
ICNET / Innovative
Concepts
313 998 0090
info@ic.net
810
Msen, Inc.
313 998 4562
info@msen.com
810
RustNet, Inc.
810 650 6812
info@rust.net
317
HolliCom Internet Services
317883 4500
cale@holli.com
812
IgLou Internet Services
800 436 4456
info@iglou.com
812
World Connection Services
812 479 1700
info@evansville.net
813
CFTnet
813 980 1317
sales@cftnet.com
813
CocoNet Corporation
813 945 0055
info@coconet.com
813
CyberGate, Inc.
305 428 4283
sales@gate.net
813
Intelligence Network
Online, Inc.
x22-> 813 442 0114
info@intnet.net
813
PacketWorks, Inc.
813 446 8826
info@packet.net
815
American Information
Systems, Inc.
708 413 8400
info@ais.net
815
InterAccess Co.
800 967 1580
info@interaccess.com
816
Interstate Networking
Corporation
816 472 4949
staff@interstate.net
816
Primenet
602 870 1010
info@primenet.com
817
Association for
Computing Machiner)'
817 776 6876
account-info@acm.org
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 659
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
817
DFW Internet Services, Inc.
817 332 5116
info@dfw.net
817
Texas Metronet, Inc.
214 705 2900
info@metronet.com
818
Abode Computer Service
818 287 5115
eric@abode.ttank.com
818
The Central Connection
818 735 3000
info@centcon.com
818
Delta Internet Services
714 778 0370
info@deltanet.com
818
DigiLink Network Services
310 542 7421
info@digilink.net
818
EarthLink Network, Inc.
213 644 9500
info@earthlink.net
818
KAIWAN Internet
714 638 2139
info@kaiwan.com
818
Lightside, Inc.
818 858 9261
info@lightside.com
818
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
818
Primenet
602 870 1010
info@primenet.com
818
Regional Alliance for
Info Networking
805 967 7246
info@rain.org
818
ViaNet Communications
415 903 2242
info@via.net
819
o:/ / info, web
613 225 3354
kevin@magi.com
Providers of
901
ISDN-Net Inc
615 377 7672
jdunlap@rex.isdn.net
Commercial
Internet
Access
901
Magibox Incorporated
901 757 7835
info@magibox.net
<
903
Cloverleaf Technologies
903 832 1367
helpdesk@clover.cleaf.com
904
CyberGate, Inc.
305 428 4283
sales@gate.net
904
Polaris Network, Inc.
904 878 9745
staff@polaris.net
904
PSS InterNet Services
800 463 8499
support@america . com
904
SymNet
904 385 1061
info@symnet.net
905
HookUp Communications
905 847 8000
info@hookup.net
905
InterLog Internet Services
416 975 2655
internet@interlog.com
905
Vaxxine Computer
Systems Inc.
905 562 3500
admin@vaxxine.com
906
Branch Information Services
313 741 4442
branch-info@branch.com
906
Msen, Inc.
313 998 4562
info@msen.com
continues
660 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Area
Code
Name
Phone
Email
908
Castle Network, Inc.
908 548 8881
request@castle.net
908
Digital Express Group
301 847 5000
info@digex.net
908
1-2000, Inc.
516 867 6379
info@i-2000.com
908
INTAC Access Corporation
800 504 6822
info@intac.com
908
Internet For 'U'
800 NET WAYl
info@ifu.net
908
Internet Online Services
x226 -> 201 928 1000
help@ios.com
619
CONNECTnet Internet
Network Services
619 450 0254
info@connectnet.com
909
Delta Internet Services
714 778 0370
info@deltanet.com
909
KAIWAN Internet
714 638 2139
info@kaiwan.com
909
Lightside, Inc.
818 858 9261
info@lightside.com
910
Interpath
800 849 6305
info@interpath.net
910
Red Barn Data Center
910 750 9809
tom@rbdc.rbdc.com
910
Vnet Internet Access
704 334 3282
info@vnet.net
912
Internet Atlanta
404 410 9000
info@atlanta.com
913
DataBank, Inc.
913 842 6699
info@databank.com
913
Interstate Networking
Corporation
816 472 4949
staff@interstate.net
914
Cloud 9 Internet
914 682 0626
info@cloud9.net
914
Computer Solutions by
Hawkinson
914 229 9853
info@mhv.net
914
Creative Data
Consultants (SILLY.COM)
718 229 0489
info@silly.com
914
DataBank, Inc.
913 842 6699
info@databank.com
914
INTAC Access Corporation
800 504 6822
info@intac.com
914
1-2000, Inc.
516 867 6379
info@i-2000.com
914
InteleCom Data
Systems, Inc.
401 885 6855
info@ids.net
914
Mnematics, Incorporated
914 359 4546
service@mne.com
914
Phantom Access
Technologies, Inc.
212 989 2418
bruce@phantom.com
914
The Pipeline Network
212 267 2626
info-info@pipeline.com
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 661
Area
Name
Code
Phone
Email
914
TZ-Link
914 353 5443
drew@j51.com
914
WestNet Internet Services
914 967 7816
info@westnet.com
915
New Mexico Technet, Inc.
505 345 6555
granoff@teclmet.nm.org
916
Great Basin Internet Services
702 829 2244
info@greatbasin.com
916
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
916
Sierra-Net
702 831 3353
giles@sierra.net
916
West Coast Online
707 586 3060
info@calon.com
916
Zocalo Engineering
510 540 8000
info@zocalo.net
918
Galaxy Star Systems
918 835 3655
info@galstar.com
918
Internet Oklahoma
918 5831161
info@ionet.net
919
Interpath
800 849 6305
info@interpath.net
919
NETCOM On-Line
Communications Services
408 554 8649
info@netcom.com
919
Vnet Internet Access
704 334 3282
info@vnet.net
Providers of
gj Commercial
'T Internet
970
EZLink Internet Access
970 482 0807
ezadmin@ezlink.com
Access
970
Frontier Internet, Inc.
970 385 4177
info@frontier.net
Foreign
Below is a listing of Internet service providers in countries other than the U.S.
and Canada, sorted by country. Fields are country, service provider name, voice
phone number, and email address for more information.
Country
Name
Phone
Email
Australia
APANA
+61 42 965015
wollongong@apana.org.au
Australia
Apanix Public Access
+61 8 373 5575
admin@apanix.apana.org.au
Australia
arrakis.apana.org.au
+61 8 296 6200
greg@arrakis.apana.org.au
Australia
AusNet Services Pty Ltd
+61 2 241 5888
sales@world.net
Australia
Byron Public Access
+61 18 823 541
admin@byron.apana.org.au
continues
662 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Country
Name
Phone
Email
Australia
DIALix Services
+61 2 948 6995
justin@sydney.dialix.oz.au
Australia
FidoNet Zone 3
Gateway
+61 3 793 2728
info@csource.pronet.com
Australia
Highway 1
+61 9 370 4584
info@highwayl.com.au
Australia
Hunter Neh\^ork
Association
+61 49 621783
mbrown@hna.com.au
Australia
iiNet Technologies
+619 3071183
iinet@iinet.com.au
Australia
Kralizec Dialup
Unix System
+61 2 837 1397
nick@kralizec.zeta.org.au
Australia
Informed Technology
+61 9 245 2279
info@it.com.au
Australia
The Message eXchange
Ft}' Ltd
+61 2 550 5014
info@tmx.com.au
Australia
Microplex Pty. Ltd.
+61 2 888 3685
info@mpx.com.au
Australia
Pegasus Networks
Pty Ltd
+61 7 2571111
fwhitmee@peg.apc.org
Australia
PPIT
Pty. Ltd. (059 051 320)
+613 747 9823
info@ppit.com.au
Australia
Stour System Services
+61 9 571 1949
stour@stour.net.au
Australia
Winthrop Technology
+61 9 380 3564
wthelp@yarrow.wt.uwa.edu.au
Austria
EUnet EDV
+43 1 3174969
info@austria.eu.net
Austria
Hochschuelerschaft...
+43 1 586 1868
sysop@link-atu.comlink.apc.org
Austria
PING EDV
+43 1 3194336
info@ping.at
Bashkiria
UD JV 'DiasPro'
+7 3472 387454
iskander@diaspro.bashkiria.su
Belarus
Open Contact, Ltd.
+7 017 2206134
admin@brc.minsk.by
Belgium
EUnet Belgium NV
+32 16 236099
info@belgium.eu.net
Belgium
Infoboard
Telematics SA
+32 2 475 25 31
ocaeymaex@infoboard.be
Belgium
INnet NV/SA
+32 14 319937
info@inbe.net
Belgium
KnoopPunt VZW
+32 9 2333 686
support@knooppunt.be
Bulgaria
EUnet Bulgaria
+359 52 259135
info@bulgaria.eu.net
Crimea
Crimea Commun-
ication Centre
+7 652 257214
sem@snail.crimea.ua
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 663
Country
Name
Phone
Email
Denmark
DKnet / EUnet
Denmark
+45 3917 9900
info@dknet.dk
Finland
Clinet Ltd
+358 0 437 5209
clinet@clinet.fi
Finland
EUnet Finland Ltd.
+358 0 400 2060
helpdesk@eunet.fi
France
French Data Network
+331 4797 5873
info@fdn.org
France
Internet Way
+331 4143 2110
info@iway.fr
France
OLEANE
+33 1 4328 3232
info-internet@oleane.net
France
STI
+33 1 3463 1919
fbl01@calvacom.fr
Georgia
Mimosi Hard
+7 8832 232857
kisho@sanet.ge
Germany
bbTT Electronic
Networks
+49 30 817 42 06
willem@b-2. de. contrib .net
Germany
EUnet Germany GmbH
+49 231 972 2222
inf o@germany .eu .net
Germany
Individual Network e.V.
+49 441 980 8556
in-info@individual.net
Germany
INS Inter Networking
Systems
+49 2305 356505
info@ins.net
Germany
Internet PoP Frankfurt
+49 69 94439192
joerg@pop-frankfurt.com
Germany
MUC.DE e.V.
+49 89 324 683 0
postmaster@muc.de
Germany
Onlineservice
Nuernberg
+49 911 9933882
info@osn.de
Germany
PFM News & Mail
Xlink POP
+49 171 331 0862
info@pfm.pfm-mainz.de
Germany
Point of Presence
GmbH
+49 40 2519 2025
info@pop.de
Germany
POP Contrib.Net
Netzdienste
+49 521 9683011
info@teuto.de
Germany
SpaceNet GmbH
+49 89 324 683 0
info@space.net
Germany
TouchNET GmbH
+49 89 54471111
info@touch.net
Germany
Westend GbR
+49 241 911879
info@westend.com
Greece
Ariadne
+30 1 651 3392
dialup@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr
Greece
Foundation of Research
+30 81 221171
forthnet-pr@forthnet.gr
Hong Kong
Hong Kong SuperNet
+852 358 7924
trouble@hk.super.net
I
Pro\iders of
G)mmerdal
Internet
Access
continues
664 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Country
Name
Phone
Email
Iceland
SURIS / ISnet
+354 1 694747
isnet-info@isnet.is
Ireland
Cork Internet Services
+353 21 277124
info@cis.ie
Ireland
leunet Limited
+353 1 679 0832
info@ieunet.ie
Ireland
Ireland On-Line
+353 91 592727
info@iol.ie
Israel
Elronet
+972 313534
info@elron.net
Israel
NetVision LTD.
+972 550330
info@netvision.net.il
Italy
ITnet S.p.A.
+39 10 6563324
info@it.net
Japan
Asahi Net
+813 3666 2811
info@asahi-net.or.jp
Japan
Global OnLine, Japan
+81 3 5330 9380
hahne@acm.org
Japan
Internet Initiative Japan
+813 3580 3781
info@iij.ad.jp
Japan
M.R.T., Inc.
+81 3 3255 8880
sysop@janis-tok.com
Japan
People World Ltd.
+81 3 5661 4130
1 8005044@people.or.jp
Japan
TWICS
+81 3 3351 5977
info@twics.com
Japan
Typhoon Inc.
+813 3757 2118
info@typhoon.co.jp
Kazakhstan
Bogas Soft
Laboratory Co.
+7 322 262 4990
pasha@sl.semsk.su
Kuwait
Gulfnet Kuwait
+965 242 6729
jolm@gulfa.ods.gulfnet.kw
Latvia
LvNet-Teleport
+3712 551133
vit@riga.lv
Latvia
Versia Ltd.
+371 2 417000
postmaster@vemet.lv
Luxemburg
EUnet Luxemburg
+352 47 02 61 361
info@luxemburg.eu.net
Mexico
Datanet S.A. de C.V.
+52 5 1075400
info@data.net.mx
Netherlands
The Delft Connection
+31 15560079
info@void.tdcnet.nl
Netherlands
Hobbynet
+31 365361683
henk@hgatenl.hobby.nl
Netherlands
Internet Access
Foundation
+31 5982 2720
mail-server@iafnl.iaf.n\
Netherlands
NEST
+31 206265566
info@nest.nl
Netherlands
NetLand
+31 206943664
info@netland.nl
Appendix B ♦ Providers of Commercial Internet Access 665
Country
Name
Phone
Email
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
NLnet (EUnet)
Psyline
Simplex Networking
Stichting XS4ALL
+31 206639366
+31 80445801
+31 206932433
+31 206225222
info@nl.net
postmaster@psyline.nl
skelmir@simplex.nl
helpdesk@xs4all.nl
New Zealand
New Zealand
Actrix Networks
Limited
Efficient Software
Limited
+64 4 389 6356
+64 3 4738274
john@actrix.gen.nz
bart@dunedin.es.co.nz
Norway
Oslonett A/S
+47 22 46 10 99
oslonett@oslonett.no
Poland
PDi Ltd. - Public
Internet
+48 42 30 21 94
info@pdi.lodz.pl
Portugal
Lisboa
716 2395
info@esoterica.com
Romania
EUnet Romania SRL
+40 1 312 6886
info@romania .eu .net
Russia
GlasNet
+7 95 262 7079
support@glas.apc.org
Providers of
Russia
Inter
^ Commercial
Communications Ltd.
+7 8632 620562
postmaster@icomm.md.su
^ Internet
^ Access
Russia
N&K Company
+7 86622 72167
serge@nik.nalchik.su
Russia
NEVAlink Ltd.
+7 812 592 3737
serg@arcom.spb.su
Russia
Relcom CO
+7 95 194 25 40
postmaster@ussr.eu.net
Russia
Svjazinform
+7 351 265 3600
pol@rich.chel.su
Slovakia
EUnet Slovakia
+42 7 725 306
info@slovakia.eu.net
Slovenia
NIL, System Inte-
gration
+386 61 1405 183
info@slovenia.eu.net
South Africa
Aztec
+27 21 419 2690
info@aztec.co.za
South Africa
Internet Africa
+27 0800 020003
info@iaccess.za
South Africa
The Internet Solution
+27 11 447 5566
info@is.co.za
Sweden
NetGuide
+46 31 28 03 73
info@netg.se
continues
666 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Country
Name
Phone
Email
Switzerland
SWITCH
+41 1 268 1515
postmaster@switch.ch
Switzerland
XGP Switzerland
+41 61 8115635
service@xgp.spn.com
Tataretan
KAMAZ Incorporated
+7 8439 53 03 34
postmaster@kamaz.kazan.su
Ukraine
ConCom, Ltd.
+7 0572 27 69 13
igor@ktts.kharkov.ua
Ukraine
Electronni Visti
+7 44 2713457
info%e1visti.kiev.ua@kiae.su
Ukraine
PACO Links
InPl Ltd.
+7 48 2200057
info@vista.odessa.ua
Ukraine
UkrCom-Kherson
Ltd
+7 5522 64098
postmaster@ukrcom.kherson.ua
UK
Compulink (CIX Ltd)
+44 181 390 8446
cixadmin@cix.compulink.co.uk
UK
CONNECT -PC
User Group
+44 181 863 1191
info@ibmpcug.co.uk
UK
Demon Internet
Services Ltd.
+44 81 349 0063
internet@demon.co.uk
UK
The Direct Connection
+44 81 313 0100
helpdesk@dircon.co.uk
UK
EUnet GB
+44 1227 266466
sales@britain.eu.net
UK
ExNet Systems Ltd.
+44 81 244 0077
info@exnet.com
UK
GreenNet
+44 71 713 1941
support@gn.apc.org
UK
Lunatech Research
+44 1734 791900
info@luna.co.uk
UK
Pavilion Internet pic
+44 1273 606072
info@pavilion.co.uk
UK
Sound & Visions BBS
+441932 253131
info@span.com
UK
Specialix
+44 932 3522251
keith@specialix.co.uk
UK
WinNET (UK)
+44 181 863 1191
info@\vin-uk.ne
HTML Tags
This appendix lists the HTML tags covered in chapter 26, "Creating Your Web Page."
Document
Organization
Address
<address>„.text...<address>
Blockquote
<blockquote>...text...</blockquote>
Heading 1
<h1>...text...</h1>
Heading 2
<h2>._text...</h2>
Heading 3
<h3>...text...</h3>
Heading 4
<h4>„.text...</h4>
Heading 5
<h5>„.text...</h5>
Heading 6
<h6>...text...</h6>
New line
<br>
New paragraph
A
Q.
V
668 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Graphics
Horizontal rule <hr attributes>
Horizontal rule examples:
<hr size=20 width=288 align=center noshade>
<hr size=10 width=75% align=left>
Image <iitig attribute(s)>
Image example:
<img src=‘ingrid.gif " align=bottotn alt=“I have expressive eyes with long
eyelashes. ">
Links
Anchor <a attribute! s)>...text...</a>
Anchor examples:
Email address:
<a href ="mailto:ingrid@tidbits. com ">ingrid0tidbits.coin</a>
Full URL:
<a href ="http : / /quest . arc . nasa. gov/livef rom/livef rom. html">Live from
Antartica</a>
Named target:
<a name=“other penguins“>Other Penguins on the Web</a>
Relative URL:
a href="reno.html“>Reno, Nevada</a>
Appendix C ♦ HTML Tags 669
Lists
Definition list
<dl>...list...</dl>
Definition list definition <dd>
Definition list term
<dt>
Definition list example:
<dl>
<dt>Tomatoes
<dd>Just chop up tomatoes and stick them on your pizza.
<dt>Mushrooms
<dd>Saute mushrooms before putting them on a pizza.
</dl>
Ordered (numbered) list <ol>...list...</ol>
List entry <li>
Unordered (bulleted) list <ul>...list...</ul>
Special Characters
Aacute (a) á ;
Ampersand (&) &
Double straight quote (") " ;
Eacute (e) é
Left angle bracket (<) < ;
Ntilde(h) ˜
Right angle bracket (>) > ;
Typography
Bold
<b>...text...</b>
Cite
<cite>...text...</cite>
Code
<code>._text...</code>
Emphasize <em>...text...</em>
PartV
670 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Italic
Keyboard
Preformatted (monospaced)
Sample
Strong
Typewriter
Underline
Variable
<i>„.text...</i>
<kbd>„.text™</kbd>
<pre>...text...</pre>
<samp>...text...</samp>
<st rong>„text...< / st rong>
<tt>...text...</tt>
<u>...text...</u>
<var>...text...</var>
tf'
Glossary
a
address commands Small extensions for UUCP/ Connect that give it addi-
tional capabilities, much as XMCDs and XFCNs give HyperCard additional
capabilities.
addressing A method of identifying a resource (such as a program) or piece of
information (such as a file) on a network. Methods of addressing vary consider-
ably from network-to-nehvork.
Adventure One of the earliest text adventure games written for computers. It
is the forerunner of the popular Zork series from Infocom.
alias In System 7, a file that "points to" another file, folder, or disk, and may
generally be used in place of the original item. In network usage, alias usually
refers to a simple name, location, or command that you can use in place of a
more complex name, location, or command. Aliases are commonly used for
email addresses, directories, or commands.
America Online A popular commercial information service with a graphical
interface.
AOL Shorthand for America Online. Each letter is pronounced separately.
672 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
AppleLink Apple's commercial online information service. Expensive, but
graphical. Slated to go away soon.
AppleLink packages The archiving and compression format used solely
by AppleLink. Stuffit Expander with Expander Enhancer can decompress
AppleLink packages.
AppleTalk A local area network protocol Apple developed to connect com-
puters and peripherals over various different types of wiring.
ARA Apple Remote Access. A software program from Apple Computer that
allows one Mac to dial another Mac via a modem and, through AppleShare
and/or Personal File Sharing, access local or network resources available to the
"answering" Mac. (Common resources include shared directories, serv^ers, and
printers.) Although 1 don't cover the issue much in this book, you can do some
neat things with ARA and MacTCP.
.ARC An older DOS archiving format.
Archie An Internet service that maintains and allows users to search a large
database of materials stored on anonymous FTP sites.
archive site A site that archives files for users to retrieve, via either FTP or
email.
ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency. The governmental organization
responsible for creating the beginnings of the Internet.
ARPAnet The proto-Internet network created by ARPA.
ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In the context of a
file, an ASCII file is one that contains only "text" characters — numbers, letters,
and standard punctuation. Although ASCII text can contain international
characters available on the Mac ("upper- ASCII"), these characters are not
commonly supported by Internet services such as email. Gopher, and FTP. In
FTP, it's a command that tells FTP tliat you will be transferring text files (which
is the default).
atob (pronounced "a to b") A Unix program that turns ASCII files into binary
files. The btoa program does the reverse.
attachments Files that are linked to a specific email message, just as you might
paperclip a clipping to a snail mail letter.
b
bandwidth Information theory used to express the amount of information that
can flow through a given point at any given time. Some points have narrow
bandwidth (indicating not much information can flow through at one time), and
Appendix D ♦ Glossary 673
others have high bandwidth (indicating a great deal of information can flow
through at one time). This term is commonly used in reference to "wasted
bandwidth/' indicating that some (or most) of the information flowing by a
point is of no use to a user. This term can include overloading a site's network
connection (thus curtailing other users' use of the lines) or including lengthy
signature files in Usenet postings or discussion groups. "Wasted bandwidth" is
often relative: What one person views as wasteful might be essential to someone
else.
bang The exclamation point! Used to separate machine names in UUCP bang-
style addressing, which isn't all that common anymore.
baud A measure of modem speed equal to one signal per second; 300 baud
equals 300 bits per second (bps). But at higher speeds one signal can contain
more than one bit, so a 9600 baud modem is not a 9600 bps modem. (The terms
often are incorrectly used interchangeably). See also bps.
BBS Bulletin Board System. A computer system that provides its users with files
for downloading and areas for electronic discussions. Bulletin board systems
usually are run by and for local users, although many now provide Internet,
UUCP, or FidoNet mail.
Binary In the context of a file, any file that contains non-textual data. (Images
and applications are examples of binary files.) In FTP, a command that tells FTP
to transfer information as an arbitrary stream of bits rather than as a series of
textual characters.
BinHex The standard Macintosh format for converting a binary file into an
ASCII file that can pass through email programs. (For those of you wondering
how to pronounce it, "Bin" rhymes with "tin," and "hex" rhymes with "sex,"
and the accent is on the first syllable.) See also uucode.
BITNET An academic large-scale computer network, primarily connecting
academic institutions. BITNET is often expanded as the "Because It's Time"
Network. A friend notes, "Actually, it seems that the definitive answer to what
the BIT stands for is 'It has varied, and depends on who you asked and when.'"
BIX The online commercial information service called the BYTE Information
Exchange, although I have never heard anyone use the full name in favor of BIX.
body The part of an email message where you type your message, as opposed
to the header or the signature.
bounce What email does when it doesn't go through.
bps Bits per second. The measurement of modem transmission speed. Not
comparable to baud after 300 bps.
Part V
674 hUernet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Brownian motion With apologies to Douglas Adams, the best example is
indeed a really hot cup of tea. It has to do with internal movement within a hot
liquid.
browser A client program that enables one to search, often somewhat ran-
domly, through the information provided by a specific type of server. Generally
used in relation to the World Wide Web.
btoa (pronounced "b to a") A Unix program that turns binary files into ASCII
files for transmission via email. The atob program decodes such files.
BTW Abbreviation for the expression, "By the way"
C
Call For Votes What you do after discussing whether a new newsgroup
should be created.
CCL Connection Control Language. Used in Apple Remote Access, InterSLIP,
and other communications programs, CCL is a scripting language that lets you
control your modem.
CERN The birthplace of the World Wide Web, although in real life they do
high energy physics research. Located in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN doesn't
stand for anything any more, altlrough it once was an acronym for a French
name.
CFV See Call For Votes.
channel In IRC, an area that theoretically has a specific discussion topic. See
IRC.
charter The document that lays out what topics a newsgroup will cover, what
its name will be, and other relevant details.
chat script A simple (you hope) conversation between your Mac and your host
machine that allows your Mac to log in automatically. Chat scripts usually
involve a series of send and expect strings. Your host sends a login prompt; your
Mac responds with your username. Your host sends a password prompt; your
Mac responds with your password.
chiasmus A term from classical rhetoric that describes a situation in which you
introduce subjects in the order A, B, and C, and then talk about them in the
order C, B, and A.
CIM See CompuServe Information Manager.
CIS Stands for CompuSewe Information Service, or simply CompuServe. Wags
often replace the S with a $. See CompuServe.
Appendix D ♦ Glossary 675
ClariNet An alternate hierarchy of newsgroups that uses the same transmis-
sion routes as Usenet, but carries commercial information from UPl and others.
You, or your provider, must pay to read ClariNet news.
client The program or computer that requests information from a server
computer or program. Used in terms of client/server computing. See also
server.
clone A DOS-based computer that imitates computers made by IBM. Referred
to as clones because they don't distinguish themselves enough for us to bother
referring to them any other way.
CMS Short for Conversational Monitor System, The part of the operating system
on certain IBM mainframes with which you interact. Not at all conversational.
command line Where you type commands to an operating system such as
DOS or Unix. Command-line operating systems can be powerful but are often a
pain to work with, especially for Macintosh users used to a graphical interface.
compress To make a file smaller by removing redundant information.
CompuServe One of the oldest and largest commercial online services. Some-
times abbreviated as CIS.
CompuServe Information Manager A decent graphical program for the Mac
(and Windows) that puts a nice face on CompuServe. Generally abbreviated
CIM.
connect time The amount of time you are actually connected to and using a
computer. Because connect or telephone charges are based on this amount of
time, you want to keep it as low as possible.
. cpt The filename extension used by Compact Pro.
CREN Corporation for Research and Educational Networking.
cross-posted What happens to a Usenet posting when you put several
newsgroup names in the Newsgroups line. More efficient than posting multiple
individual copies.
CSLIP Compressed SLIP. A type of SLIP account that uses compression to
increase performance.
d
daemons Small programs in Unix that run frequently to see whether some-
thing has happened: if so, they act as they were programmed; if not, they go
back to sleep.
Party
676 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Replaced ARPA and had a
more military bent. Has since been renamed ARPA again. See also ARPA.
DEC Digital Equipment Corporation. Also known as Digital, this company
produces the popular VAX line of computers and the VMS operating system.
dialing scripts In InterSLIP, the scripts that control modem dialog. See also
CCL.
dial up To call another computer via modem. The term is often lumped
together as one word except when used as a verb.
dialup A connection or line reached by modem, as in "a dialup line."
digest A single message that contains multiple individual postings to a
mailing list or newsgroup.
domain A level of hierarchy in a machine's full nodename. For instance,
tidbits.com is in the com domain, as are many other machines.
domain name server A computer that keeps track of names of other machines
and their numeric IP addresses. When you refer to a machine by name, your
domain name server translates that information appropriately into the numeric
IP address necessary to make the connection.
domain name system The system that makes it possible for you to think in
terms of names such as penguin.tidbits.com, whereas computers think in terms
of 204.25.157.10.
DOS An elderly operating system that is frequently helped across the street by
Microsoft Windows.
download To retrieve a file from another machine, usually a host machine, to
your machine.
downstream Usenet neighbors that are downstream from you get most of their
news from your machine, in contrast to machines that are upstream from you.
dynamic addressing When your Mac gets its IP number for each session from
the server to which you connect. Linked to the Server button in the Obtain
Address part of MacTCP. Not to be confused with the Dynamically button,
which picks an IP number from a range at random.
e
electronic mail or email Messages that travel through the networks rather
than being committed to paper and making the arduous journey through the
U.S. Postal Service.
Appendix D ♦ Glossary 677
emoticons A rather silly name for smileys.
Ethernet A type of local area network that is much faster than LocalTalk. Most
Macs can use Ethernet by adding an Ethernet expansion card; some recent Macs
come with Ethernet built-in.
. etx The filename extension for setext files, which are straight text files in a
specific format that's easy to read online and can be decoded for even better
display.
expire After a certain amount of time, Usenet postings can be set to expire,
which means that they will be deleted even if they haven't been read, so that
they don't waste space.
f
FAQ Frequently Asked Question. Lists of commonly asked questions and their
answers, often posted in newsgroups to reduce the number of novice questions.
Read a FAQ list before asking a question, to make sure yours isn't a frequently
asked one.
Fax Slang tor facsimile. A technology that takes paper from the sender and
produces more paper that looks just like it at the recipient's end. You can use fax
modems to eliminate the paper step at one end or both, but they may be less
reliable than stand-alone fax machines. Email is cleaner, often cheaper, and more
environmentally friendly, and the results are more useful in other programs.
However, you can't easily send signatures or existing paper documents via
email.
feed Shorthand for a connection to another machine that sends you mail and
news. I might say, "I have a mail feed from Ed's machine."
Fidonet A network of cooperating bulletin board systems that has some links
to the Internet.
filename extension A three-letter (usually) code at the end of a filename that
indicates what type of file it is. Essential in non-Macintosh environments that
lack icons or other methods of identifying files. Common extensions include
.txt for text files, .hqx for BinHexed files, and .sit for Stuffit files.
fileserver or file server A machine that provides files via a network. Perhaps
because of time spent working on BITNET, I tend to use it as a synonym for
mailserver, or a machine that returns files that are requested via email.
file site Another name for an archive site or FTP site. A computer on which
files are stored for anyone on the Internet to retrieve.
ParlV
678 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Finger A method of finding out information about someone else on the
Internet.
firewall A security system that not only prevents intruders from entering, but
also often prevents legitimate users from getting out to the Internet from the
local network. A firewall usually has a single machine that's connected to the
Internet and all Internet traffic must pass through that machine.
flame war A conflagration in which lots of people jump in on different sides of
an argument and start insulting each other. Fun to watch briefly, but a major
waste of bandwidth.
flaming The act of calling into question someone's thoughts, beliefs, and
parentage simply because you don't agree with them. Don't do it.
followup An article on Usenet posted in reply to another article. The subject
should stay the same so that readers can tell the two articles are related.
forms In the World Wide Web, online electronic forms that you can fill in if
you have a forms-capable Web browser such as MacWeb or NCSA Mosaic 2.0.
Freenet An organization whose goal is to provide free Internet access in a
specific area, often by working with local schools and libraries. Ask around to
see if a Freenet has sprung up in your area. The first and preeminent example is
the Cleveland Freenet. Freenet also refers to the specific Freenet software, and
the information services that use it.
freeware Software that you can distribute freely and use for free, but for which
the author often retains the copyright, which means that you can't modify it.
FTP File Transfer Protocol. One of the main ways in which you retrieve, umm,
well, files from other machines on the Internet.
FTPmail A method of retrieving files stored on FTP sites via email.
FYI Abbreviation for the expression, "For your information."
S
gateway A machine that exists on two networks, such as the Internet and
BITNET, and that can transfer mail between them.
gateway script In InterSLIP, a script that controls the login process. See also
CCL.
GIF Graphics Interchange Format. A platform-independent file format devel-
oped by CompuServe, the GIF format is commonly used to distribute graphics
Appendix D # Glossary 679
on the Internet. Mighty battles have been waged over the pronunciation of this
term, and although Robin Williams notes that it's pronounced "jiff" in her book,
Jargon, both of my glossary proofreaders flagged it as being pronounced with a
hard g, as in "graphics." I surrender; pronounce it as you like.
.gif The filename extension generally given to GIF files.
GNU With apologies for the circular reference, GNU stands for GNU's Not
Unix. Developed by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, GNU
is (or will be, when finished) a high-quality version of the Unix operating system
that is free of charge and freely modifiable by its users. GNU software is distrib-
uted at no cost with source code. Many GNU applications and utilities are
mainstays of the Unix community.
Gopher An information retrieval system created by the University of Minne-
sota. In wide acceptance on the Internet, Gopher is one of the most useful
resources available.
Gopherspace The collection of all available Gopher servers.
.gz An extension used by GNU's version of ZIP, called gzip.
hard close In MacPPP, a process that disconnects you from the Internet and
prevents any programs from automatically redialing until you restart.
header The part of an email message or Usenet posting that contains informa-
tion about the message, such as who it's from, when it was sent, and so on.
Headers are mainly interesting when something doesn't work.
home page In the World Wide Web, the document that is accessed first after
launching a Web browser.
host The large computer you connect to for your Internet access.
.hqx The filename extension used for BinHex files.
HTML HyperText Markup Language. The language used to mark up text files
with styles and links for use with World Wide Web browsers.
HTTP HyperText Transport Protocol. The protocol used by the World Wide
Web.
hypertext A term created by visionary Ted Nelson to describe non-linear
writing in which you follow associative paths through a world of textual docu-
ments. The most common use of hypertext these days is in the links on Web
pages.
PaiiV
680 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
1
lAB See Internet Architecture Board.
IBM International Business Machines. Many flip expansions for the acronym
exist, but IBM remains one of the most powerful companies in the computer
industry despite numerous problems in recent years. Developer of numerous
mainframes and obtuse operating systems, some of which are still in use today.
Co-developer (with Apple and Motorola) of the PowerPC chip, used in the
Power Macintoshes.
IETF See Internet Engineering Task Force.
IMAP Interactive Mail Access Protocol. A new protocol for the storage and re-
trieval of email (much like POP, the Post Office Protocol). It's not in wide use
yet.
IMHO Abbreviation for the expression, "In my humble opinion."
information agent A software program (currently only an interface to fre-
quently updated databases) that can search numerous databases for information
that interests you without your having to know what it is searching. Archie and
Veronica are current examples of information agents.
internet With a lowercase /, it's a group of connected networks.
Internet The collection of all the connected networks in the world, although it
is sometimes better called WorldNet or just the Net. More specifically, the
Internet is the set of networks that communicate via TCP/IP.
Internet access provider An organization that provides Internet access for
individuals or other organizations, often for a fee.
Internet Architecture Board A group of invited volunteers that manages
certain aspects of the Internet, such as standards and address allocation.
Internet Engineering Task Force A volunteer organization that meets regu-
larly to discuss problems facing the Internet.
IP Internet Protocol. The main protocol used on the Internet.
IP number A four-part number that uniquely identifies a machine on the
Internet. For instance, my IP number for penguin. tidbits. com is 204.57.157.10,
People generally use the name, instead.
IRC Internet Relay Chat. A world-wide network of people talking to each other
in real time over the Internet rather than in person.
ISOC The Internet Society. A membership organization that supports the
Internet and is the governing body to which the lAB reports.
Appendix D ♦ Glossary 681
]
JANET Joint Academic Network. Great Britain's national network. In true British
fashion, JANET addresses work backwards from normal Internet addresses.
They work from largest domain to the smallest, as in joe@uk. ac.canterbury.ee
.trumble. Luckily, most gateways to JANET perform the necessary translations
automatically.
jargon The sometimes incomprehensible language used to talk about special-
ized topics. If you need help with computer jargon, check out Jargon, by Robin
Williams, a light-hearted and detailed trip through this industry.
Jolt cola All the sugar and twice the caffeine of normal colas. First suggested
as a joke by comedian George Carlin, later developed and marketed by Carlin
and a food industry entrepreneur.
JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group. A group that has defined a compression
scheme that reduces the size of image files by up to 20 times at the cost of
slightly reduced image quality.
. j peg A filename extension used to mark JPEG-compressed images.
Jughead A searching agent for Gopher, much like Veronica, but more focused.
k
Kermit A file transfer protocol actually named after the popular Kermit the
Frog. Kermit is generally slower than XMODEM, YMODEM, and the top-
of-the-line ZMODEM.
1
LAN See local area network.
leaf site A machine on Usenet that talks to only one other machine instead of
passing news onto other machines.
line noise Static on a telephone line that causes trouble for modem connec-
tions.
LISTSERV A powerful program for automating mailing lists. It currently
requires an IBM mainframe, but that requirement may change in the near future.
local area network Often abbreviated LAN. Two or more computers connected
together via network cables. If you have a Macintosh connected to a LaserWriter
printer (which contains a CPU), you have a rudimentary^ local area network.
Party
682 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
LocalTalk The form of local area networking hardware that Apple builds into
every Macintosh.
login The process by which you identify yourself to a host computer. Usually
involves a userid and a password.
lurkers Not a derogatory term. People who merely read discussions online
without contributing to them.
m
MacBinary A file format that combines the three parts of a Macintosh file: the
data fork, resource fork, and Finder information block. No other computers
understand the normal Macintosh file format, but they can transmit the
MacBinary format without losing data. When you download a binary Macintosh
file from another computer using the MacBinary format, your communications
program automatically reassembles the file into a normal Macintosh file.
MacTCP A control panel from Apple that implements TCP on the Macintosh.
MacTCP is required to use programs such as Fetch and TurboGopher.
mail bombing The act of sending hundreds or thousands of messages to
someone you think deserves the punishment for transgressions against the
Internet. Highly discouraged.
mailing list A list of people who all receive postings sent to the group. Mailing
lists exist on all sorts of topics.
mailserver A program that provides access to files via email. See also
fileserver.
man pages The Unix manual pages. You must go to the man pages to find out
more about a Unix command. Accessed through use of the man command
followed by the command whose description you want to view.
Manually A button in the MacTCP Obtain Address area. Use it if your system
administrator gives you a specific IP address. Also known as static addressing.
MCC Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. No, I don't know
where the T went, either. An industry consortium that developed MacWAIS and
MacWeb.
MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. An Internet standard for transfer-
ring non-textual data, such as audio messages or pictures, via email.
mirror site An FTP site that contains exactly the same contents as another site.
Mirror sites help distribute the load from a single popular site.
Appendix D # Glossary 683
modem Stands for modulator-demodulator, because that's what it does, techni-
cally. In reality, a modem allows your computer to talk to another computer via
the phone lines.
moderator An overworked volunteer who reads all of the submissions to a
mailing list or newsgroup, to make sure they are appropriate, before posting
them.
monospaced font A font whose characters are all the same width. Courier
and Monaco are common monospaced fonts on the Macintosh. You generally
want to use a monospaced font when reading text on the Internet.
MPEG Motion Picture Experts Group. More commonly, a compression format
for video. Files compressed with MPEG generally have the extension .mpeg.
.mpeg A filename extension used to mark MPEG-compressed video.
MTU Maximum Transmission Unit. A number that your system administrator
must give you so that you can configure SLIP.
MUD Multi-User Dungeon, or sometimes Multi-User Dimension. A text-based
alternate reality where you can progress to a level at which you can modify the
environment — mostly used for games, and extremely addictive.
MX record Mail Exchange record. An entry in a database that tells domain name
servers where they should route mail so that it gets to you.
n
NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications. A group that has
produced a great deal of public domain software for the scientific community.
They wrote NCSA Telnet and NCSA Mosaic for the Macintosh.
net heavies Those system administrators who run large sites on the Internet.
Although they don't necessarily have official posts, they wield more power than
most people on the nets.
Network Information Center An organization that provides information
about a network.
Network Time Protocol A protocol for transmitting the correct time around
the Internet.
network time server The machine from which you set your clock using
Network Time Protocol.
PartV
684 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
news Synonymous with Usenet news, or sometimes just Usenet.
newsgroup A discussion group on Usenet devoted to talking about a specific
topic. Currently, approximately 9,000 newsgroups exist.
. newsrc The file that Unix newsreaders use to keep track of which messages in
which newsgroups you've read.
newsreader A program that helps you read news and provides capabilities for
following or deleting threads.
NIC See Network Information Center.
nickname An easy-to-remember shortcut for an email address. Sometimes also
called an alias.
NNTP Net Nezvs Transport Protocol A transmission protocol for the transfer of
Usenet news.
nodename The name of a machine, like penguin .tidbits . com.
NREN National Research and Education Network. The successor to the NSFNET.
NSF National Science Foundation. The creators of the NSFNET.
NSFNET National Science Foundation Netzvork. The current high-speed netw'^ork
that links users with supercomputer sites around the country. Also called the
interim NREN.
O
offline Actions performed when you aren't actually connected to anotlier
computer.
online Actions performed when you are connected to another computer.
p
page In the World Wide Web, the name for the basic document type.
PEP Packetized Ensemble Protocol. Telebit's proprietary method of increasing
throughput when two of Telebit's modems connect to each other.
POP Post Office Protocol. A protocol for the storage and retrieval of email.
Eudora uses POP.
port In software, the act of converting code so that a program runs on more
than one type of computer. In networking, a number that identifies a specific
Appendix D ♦ Glossary 685
"channel" used by network services. For instance, Gopher generally uses port
70, but occasionally is set to use other ports on various machines.
post To send a message to a discussion group or list.
PPP Point to Point Protocol. A protocol functionally similar to SLIP that enables
your Mac to pretend it is a full Internet machine, using only a modem and a
normal telephone line.
proportionally spaced font A font whose characters vary in width, so that, for
example, a W is wider than an i. Proportionally spaced fonts often work poorly
when you're reading text on the Internet.
protocol A language that computers use when talking to each other.
public domain Software that you can use freely, distribute freely, and modify
in any way you wish. See also freeware and shareware.
q
QuickTime An Apple technology for time-based multiple media data.
QuickTime files can include text, sound, animation, and video, among other
formats. Despite being internally compressed, QuickTime movies are often huge
and are hard to work with on the Internet.
quoting The act of including parts of an original message in a reply. The
standard character used to set off a quote from the rest of the text is a column of
> (greater-than) characters along the left margin.
r
ranking The method by which WAIS displays found documents in order of
possible utility.
relevance feedback A method WAIS uses to "find me more documents like
this one."
Request for Comments Documents containing the standards, proposed
standards, and other necessary details regarding the operation of the Internet.
Request for Discussion The part of the newsgroup creation process where
you propose a group and discussion begins.
RFC See Request for Comments.
RFD See Request for Discussion.
PartV
686 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
root directory The topmost directory that you can see. On the Mac, you see the
root directory when you double-click on your hard disk icon.
rotl3 A method of encoding possible offensive postings on Usenet so that
those who don't want to be offended can avoid accidentally seeing the posting.
Works by converting each letter to a number {a = l,b-2, and so forth), adding
13 to the number, and then converting back into letters, rendering the file
unreadable without deciphering.
S
.sea The filename extension used by almost all self-extracting archives on
the Mac.
self-extracting archive A compressed file or files encapsulated in a decom-
pression program, so you don't need any other programs to expand the archive.
server A machine that makes services available on a network to client pro-
grams. A file server makes files available. A Web server makes Web pages
available through the HTTP protocol.
Server A button in MacTCP's Obtain Address area that enables MacTCP to
work with a dynamically addressed account.
setext Structure-enhanced text, A method of implicitly marking up text files to
make them both easy to read online, and readable by special browser software
offline.
shareware A method of software distribution in which the software may be
freely distributed, and you may try it before paying. If you decide to keep and
use the program, you send your payment directly to the shareware author.
signature Several lines automatically appended to your email messages,
usually listing your name and email address, sometimes along with witty
sayings and ASCII graphics. Keep them short, and leave out the ASCII graphics.
. sit The filename extension used by files compressed with Stuffit.
SLIP Serial Line Internet Protocol, Like PPP, a protocol that lets your Mac
pretend it is a full Internet machine, using only a modem and a normal phone
line. SLIP is older and less flexible than PPP but currently somewhat more
prevalent.
smileys Collections of characters meant to totally replace body language,
intonation, and complete physical presence. ;-)
Appendix D ♦ Glossary 687
SMTP Simple Mail Transport Protocol. The protocol used on the Internet to
transfer mail. Eudora uses SMTP to send mail.
snail mail The standard name on the Internet for paper mail because email can
travel across the country in seconds, whereas my birthday present from my
parents once took a week.
soft close In MacPPP, the method of disconnecting from the Internet in such a
way that applications can still automatically connect later on. See also hard
close.
source In WAIS jargon, a database of information. Used interchangeably with
server in the context of WAIS.
spamming The act of sending hundreds of inappropriate postings to Usenet
newsgroups and mailing lists. Do it and you'll seriously regret it.
Standard File Dialog The dialog box that appears when you choose Open or
Save As (and sometimes Save) from the File menu. Also known as the SFDialog.
static addressing When your Mac is assigned a permanent IP number. Most
commonly used on networks that are permanently connected to the Internet. To
use static addressing on the Mac, you select the Manually button in MacTCP's
Obtain Address area.
system administrator The person who runs your host machine or network.
Also known as the network administrator or just plain administrator. Be very nice
to this person.
t
T1 A high-speed network link used on the Internet.
T3 An even higher speed network link used on the Internet.
.tar The filename extension used by files made into an ardiive by the Unix tar
program.
TCP Transmission Control Protocol. It works with IP to ensure that packets
travel safely on the Internet.
TCP/IP The combination of Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol.
The base protocols on which the Internet is founded.
Telnet Can refer to a terminal emulation protocol that lets you log in to other
machines, or a program that implements this protocol on any of various plat-
forms. On the Mac, NCSA Telnet is the standard.
PartV
688 hiternet Starter Kit for Macintosh
terminal A piece of hardware like a VTIOO that lets you interact with a charac-
ter-based operating system such as Unix.
terminal emulator Software that allows one computer, such as a Mac, to act
like a dedicated terminal, such as a VTIOO.
text In terms of files, a file that contains only characters from the ASCII charac-
ter set. In terms of FTP, a mode that assumes the files you will be transferring
contain only ASCII characters. You set this mode in FTP with the ASCII com-
mand.
thread A group of messages in a Usenet newsgroup that all share the same
subject and topic, so you can easily read the entire thread or delete it, depending
on your specific newsreader.
TidBITS A free weekly newsletter distributed solely over computer networks.
TidBITS focuses on the Macintosh and the world of electronic communications.
I'm the editor, so I think it's neat. Send email to lnfo@tidbits.com for subscrip-
tion information.
timeout After a certain amount of idle time, some connections will disconnect,
hanging up the phone in the case of a SLIP connection.
.txt The filename extension generally used for straight text files that you can
read (as opposed to text files that have been encoded by BinHex or uuencode).
U
Unix An extremely popular, if utterly cryptic, operating system in wide use on
computers on the Internet. Other operating systems work fine on the Internet,
but Unix is probably the most common.
upload To send a file to another machine.
upstream Machines that send you most of your Usenet news are said to be
upstream from you. Machines that get most of their news from you are down-
stream.
Usenet An anarchic network of sorts, composed of thousands of discussion
groups on every imaginable topic.
Usenet news The news that flows through Usenet. Sometimes abbreviated
Usenet or news.
userid The name you use to log in to another computer. Synonymous with
username.
username See userid. They're generally the same.
Appendix D ♦ Glossnn/ 689
.uu The filename extension generally used by uuencoded files.
uucode A file format used for transferring binary files in email, which can only
reliably carry ASCII files. See also uuencode and uudecode.
UUCP Unix to Unix CoPy. UUCP is a small pun on the fact that the Unix copy
command is cp. UUCP is a transmission protocol that carries email and news.
.uud A filename extension sometimes used by uuencoded files.
uudecode A Unix program for decoding files in the uuencode format, turning
them from ASCII back into binary files. Several Macintosh programs can per-
form this function as well.
. uue Yet another filename extension sometimes used by uuencoded files.
uuencode A Unix program that turns binary files into ASCII files for transmis-
sion via email. Several Macintosh programs also can create uuencoded files.
V
V.34 Currently the fastest standard modem protocol, although others are due
to appear soon. Although not required, almost all v.34 modems support all sorts
of other protocols, including v.42 error correction and v.42bis data compression.
Don't worry about the specifics; just tr}' to match protocols with the modems
you call.
Veronica An information agent that searches a database of Gopher servers to
find items that interest you.
VMS DEC'S main operating system for their Vax computers.
VTIOO Originally, a dedicated terminal built by DEC to interface to main-
frames. The VTIOO became a standard for terminals, and as a result almost all
terminal emulation programs can emulate the VTIOO. The VTlOOs make excel-
lent footstools these days and will be outlived only by terminals made long ago
by DataMedia that can withstand being dropped out a window without losing a
connection.
W
WAIS Wide Area Information Servers. A set of full-text databases containing
information on hundreds of topics. You can search WAIS using natural lan-
guage queries and use relevance feedback to refine your search.
PartV
690 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
WAN See wide-area network.
wide-area network A group of geographically separated computers connected
via dedicated lines or satellite links. The Internet enables small organizations to
simulate a wide-area network without the cost of one.
wildcards Special characters such as and ? that can stand in for other charac-
ters during text searches in some programs. The * wildcard generally means
"match any number of characters in this spot/' whereas the ? wildcard generally
means "match any character in this spot."
World Wide Web The newest and most ambitious of the special Internet
services. World Wide Web browsers can display styled text and graphics. Often
abbreviated WWW.
worm A program that infiltrates a computer system and copies itself many
times, filling up memory and disk space and crashing the computer. The most
famous worm of all time was released accidentally by Robert Morris over the
Internet; it brought down whole sections of the Internet.
WWW See World Wide Web.
X-Z
XMODEM A common modem file transfer protocol.
YMODEM Another common modem file transfer protocol.
.z The filename extension used by files compressed with the Unix Compress
program.
.z A filename extension used by files compressed with the Unix gzip program.
.ZIP The filename extension used by files compressed into the ZIP format
common on PCs.
ZMODEM The fastest and most popular modem file transfer protocol.
e
X
I n d
Symbols
# (hash mark), URLs, 116
#superguy IRC channel, 69
-23004 error message
(MacTCP), 368
/ (slash), URLs, 113
/ / (two slashes), URL
schemes, 112
: (colon), URLs, 112, 116
; (semicolon), URLs, 115
= (equal sign), URLs, 115
? (question mark), URLs, 116
@ (at symbol), Internet
addresses, 109
-(tilde), URLs, 116
800 numbers (service
providers), 212
A
a2i communications service
provider, 619
ABVVAM, Inc. service pro-
vider, 624
Acceptable Use Policies, 45
access providers, see service
providers
accounts
PPP, 331-332
SLIP, 351
add-on utilities
HTML, 513-516
InterSLlP, 362
MacPPP, 343-345
Add /Strip utility, 196
AddMail utility (email), 401
address commands
(UUCP), 671
addresses, 671
commercial service pro-
vider formats, 218
dynamic, 314, 676
email, 119
Internet sites, 103-110
LISTSERV mailing lists, 138
MacTCP, 314
static, 687
TidBlTS, 30
Usenet newsgroups,
147-149
Web pages, 491-492
administrators, 45-46, 139, 687
Advanced Research Projects
Agency Netv\^ork (ARPAnet),
38-39
Aladdin Systems, customer
service number, 286
aliases (email), 131, 215, 671
Alpha HTML authoring pro-
gram, 514
alternative addressing meth-
ods (Internet sites), 110
America Online (AOL), 671
connections, 232
cost, 232-233
customer service
number, 233
email gateway, 222
FTP access, 227-230
Gopher access, 230-231
Internet connections,
221-232
mailing lists, 223
newsgroup access, 225-22
Veronica access, 231
WAIS access, 230-231
WWW access, 232
692 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Anarchic client program, 34,
91, 163
Archie server con-
nections, 439
bookmarks, 441, 606-607
configurations, 605
connections, 605
copying URLs, 441
cost, 443
installation, 436-437
ISKM disk
configurations, 306
installation, 308
launching, 605
log files, 441
operating modes, 437-440
search log files, 443
setup, 436-437
special features, 440-443
Transcript window, 442
uploading files, 442
Angel Networks, Inc. service
provider, 625
AOL, see America Online
Apple Internet Users mailing
list, 342, 367
Apple Modem Tool
(Eudora), 280
AppleLink, 248, 672
AppleScript (FTP sites), 548
AppleTalk, 672
ARA (Apple Remote Access),
MacTCP, 346-348, 672
Arachnid HTML authoring
program, 517
ARC filename extension, 672
Archie client program, 34, 85,
169-171
Archie server pop-up menu
(Internet Config), 525
archive sites, 11, 33, 672
ARPAnet (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network),
38-39, 672
ASCII (American Standard
Code for Information Inter-
change), 186-190, 494-495, 672
at symbol (@), Internet ad-
dresses, 109
AT&T customer service
number, 211
atob Unix program, 672
au filename extension, 199
audioconferencing
Maven program, 546
NetPhone program, 547
Authentication dialog box
(MacPPP), 339
author biography, 5-6
authoring programs (HTML),
513-516
Autograph utility (email), 401
AutoShare utility (email), 401
AutoWeb HTML authoring
program, 517
avi filename extension, 200
B
backgammon (MacFIBS client
program), 536
Balloon Help (Eudora), 395
bandwidth, 121, 672
bang addressing (Internet
sites), 110, 673
BART mail server, 167
baud rates, 673
BBEdit HTML authoring
program, 514
BBSs (bulletin board systems),
205, 673
FirstClass, 262-264
NovaLink Professional,
265-266
TeleFinder, 266-269
binary files, 673
ASCII formats, 186-190
Usenet newsgroups,
downloading, 156
BinHex file format,
187-188, 673
BITFTP (BITNET FTP), 166
BITNET, 41, 673
bits per second (bps), modem
transmission rates, 23
Bittco Solutions, Inc., 545
BIX, 248, 673
BlitzMail email program, 397
Blue Skies client program
(Gopher), 458
Bolo game program, 535
bookmarks
Anarchie client program,
441, 606-607
Fetch client program, 446
FTP sites, 163
ISKM disk installation, 309
Netscape Navigator
browser, 468-474
TurboGopher client
program, 454
books, electronic publishing,
98-100
bounces (email messages),
126-127, 673
bps (bits per second), modem
transmission rates, 23, 673
browsers (WWW), 35, 183, 674
Clay Basket, 476-479
Enhanced Mosaic, 476-479
helper applications,
479-483
httpd4Mac, 477-479
Lynx, 26
MacWeb, 462-467
MacWWW, 477-479
Mosaic, 78
NCSA Mosaic, 477-479
Netscape Navigator,
467-475
NetWings, 478-479
WebSTAR, 478-479
browsing
Internet sites, 76-88
WWW, 609-610
btoa (binary to ASCII) file
format, 189, 674
business services, service
provider support, 216
Index 693
C
Canter & Siegel spamming
incident, 48
capital letters (email
messages), 119
case sensitivity (email
messages), 119
CCL (Connection Control
Language), 355, 674
celebrity users, 60-63
Celestin Company, email
address, 636
CERN, 674
CFV (Call For Votes), Usenet
newsgroups, 152
channels (IRCs), 69-73, 172, 674
charters (Usenet newsgroups),
152, 674
Chat program, 544
chat scripts (Eudora), 278, 674
Chunkjoiner utility, 247
CIM (CompuServe Informa-
tion Manager), 235
Cinenet Communications, Inc.
service provider, 617
ClariNet newsgroups, 159, 675
Clay Basket browser, 476-479
client computers, 20-21
client programs, 675
Anarchie, 34, 91, 163,
436-443, 605-607
ARA for MacTCP, 346-348
Archie, 34, 87, 169-171
Blue Skies (Gopher), 458
Fetch, 444-450
FTP, 163-164
GopherSurfer (Gopher), 458
InterPPP, 346
Jughead, 35, 180-181
MacPPP 2.1SD,345
MacTCP, 370
MacWeb, 607-612
Mosaic, 78
PNLInfo Browser
(Gopher), 459
Snatcher, 163
TCP/ Connect II, 552-563
TurboGopher, 453-458
TurboGopher VR
(Gopher), 459
Veronica, 35, 180
VersaTerm-Link, 563-570
WAIS, 533-534
client/server computing,
25, 111
clip2gif utility, 503
clones, 675
CMS (Conversational Monitor
System), 675
Co-motion Lite for Internet
program, 545
colon (:), URLs, 112,116
Comet program (Telnet), 532
command line, 675
commercial service providers,
204-205, 217-219
America Online, 219-233
AppleLink, 248
BIX, 248
CompuServe, 233-244, 675
Delphi, 249
email utilities, 252-259
eWorld, 244-247
GEnie, 249
Outland, 250
Pipeline Internaut, 250
Prodigy, 250
TCP/ Connect II, 251
see also ser\dce providers
Communicate/ Communicate
Lite terminal emulators, 285
communication via Internet,
18-20
Communications Toolbox
utility, 277
Compact Pro file format, 192
composing email messages,
130-131
compression file formats,
190-194, 675
CompuServe, 675
connections, 243-244
cost, 243-244
email support, 236-238
FTP access, 241-243
Internet connections, 235
Internet services, 236-243
MacTCP configurations, 233
newsgroup access, 238-241
PowerTalk gateway, 259
PPP configurations, 234
software, 234-235
Telnet support, 241
WWW site, 244
computers (host /client), 20-21
configurations
Anarchie client
program, 605
Eudora email program, 388,
592-594
Internet Config program,
588-591
InterSLIP, 353, 584-587
MacPPP, 303-305, 578-581
MacTCP, 302, 306, 575-577
MacWeb client
program, 607
Netscape Navigator
browser, 468-470
NewsWatcher newsreader,
599-601
Configure Server dialog box
(MacPPP), 337
confirming mailing list
subscriptions, 140
Connect Script dialog box
(MacPPP), 340
connect time, 675
connections
America Online, 232
Anarchie, 605
CompuServe, 243-244
eWorld, 247
FTP sites, 163
hardware requirements, 4-5
InterSLIP, 587-588
MacPPP, 341-342, 581-583
MacTCP, 313
service providers, 203-216
SLIP, 359-360
troubleshooting, 365-383
Index
694 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
control panels (MacTCP), 317
Control PPP utility
(MacPPP), 343
converters
HTML, 512-513
RTF, 512-513
XTND, 513
converting graphics to GIF/
JPEG files, 501-503
copying
HTML, 509
URLs into Anarchie, 441
copyrights
electronic publishing, 99
infringements (Usenet
newsgroups), 158
WAIS, 177
cost
America Online, 232-233
Anarchie client
program, 443
AppleLink, 248
BIX, 248
CompuServe, 243-244
Delphi, 249
eWorld, 247
Fetch client program, 449
GEnie, 249
Internet connections, 43-45
Netscape Navigator
browser, 475
Prodigy, 251
service providers, 208-212
TCP /Connect II
program, 563
TIA, 273
VersaTerm-Link
program, 570
cpt filename extension,
192, 675
CREN (Corporation for Re-
search and Educational
Networking), 675
cross-posting newsgroup
messages, 149, 675
Crosstalk for Macintosh termi-
nal emulator, 285
CSDC service provider, 619
CSLIP (Compressed SLIP),
349, 675
CU-SeeMe videoconferencing
program, 545
custom domain names via
service providers, 214
D
Daemon program
(user info), 540
daemons, 675
DARPA (Defense Advanced
Research Projects
Agency), 676
databases
WAIS, 34
X.500, 54
deleting email messages, 129,
597-598
Delphi, 249
DHCP (Dynamic Host Con-
figuration Protocol), 326
Dial Script pop-up menu
(InterSLIP), 354
dialing scripts, 355, 676
dialup (modem con-
nections), 676
digests (mailing lists),
136-137, 676
Digital, Inc., 676
Dilbert Web page, 464
directories
FTP, 215
POCIA, 635
WAIS, 177
disclaimers (email
messages), 118
DiskDoubler compression
utility, 193
distributing Usenet newsgroup
messages, 151
DNR (Domain Name Resolver)
file, MacTCP, 322, 369
domain name servers,
103, 314, 676
MacTCP, 319-321
troubleshooting, 371-375
domain name systems, 676
domain names via service
providers, 214
domains (Internet addresses),
104, 676
machine names, 107-108
mid-level, 106-107
top-level, 104-106
DOS, 676
DOS compression file
formats, 194
downloading, 676
America Online
software, 220
binary files from
newsgroups, 156
files
with Fetch client
program, 448
with NewsWatcher
newsreader, 413
with TurboGopher,
92, 455
FTP files
via America Online, 229
via Anarchie, 438, 605
via email, 164-168
via mailing list
managers, 168
downstream computers, 688
Drag Manager utility, 413, 448
DRVR 22 error message
(MacTCP), 370
Dungeons & Dragons FTP
sites, 537
dynamic addresses, 314, 676
E
EarthLink Network, Inc.
service provider, 617
Easy View utility (email),
197, 402
Index 695
Echo Interval pop-up menu
(MacPPP), 335
electronic books, 98-100
electronic magazines, 98-100
electronic mail, see email
electronic newsletters, 96-97
electronic publishing, 96-100,
174-178
Element pop-up menu
(MacWeb browser), 462
email (electronic mail),
10, 30, 676
addresses, 119
aliases, 215
America Online
gateway, 222
BlitzMail program, 397
bouncing, 673
commercial service
provider address
formats, 218
CompuServe, 236-238
Emailer program, 397
etiquette, 119
Eudora program, 276-281,
385-396, 591-598
eWorld, 246-247
file attachments, 122
finding users, 131-133
ISKM disk config-
urations, 305
Knowbot Information Ser-
vice, 133
LeeMail program, 397
MacPost program, 398
MaiPLink Internet for
PowerTalk program, 398
MailConverter utility, 259
MailDrop program, 398
mailing lists, 133-143
mailservers, 30
messages, 117-127
body, 118-123
bounces, 126-127
capital letters, 119
case sensitivity, 119
composing, 130-131
deleting, 129, 597-598
disclaimers, 118
emoticons /smileys, 120
forwarding, 130
headers, 123-126, 679
navigating, 128-129
reading, 127-128, 597-598
replying, 129-130, 597-598
signatures, 117-118
Phone Book servers, 133
POPmail program, 399
PowerTalk utility, 259
privacy policies, 122
programs, 127-131
sending
from America Online,
223-225
from AppleLink, 248
from CompuServe, 238
from Delphi, 249
from eWorld, 246
from FirstClass BBSs, 264
from GEnie, 249
from Prodigy, 251
to President Clinton, 594
with Eudora, 390-394
signatures, 686
TCP/Connect II support,
552-555
TidBITS address, 30
TechMail program, 399
utilities, 252-259, 400-406
VersaTerm-Link support,
564-565
VideoMail program, 399
WWW access, 183
Z-Mail program, 400
Emailer program, 397
Emailer utility, 252-259
emoticons, 120, 677
encryption (newsgroup mes-
sages), 155-156
Enhanced Mosaic browser,
476-479
equal sign (=), URLs, 115
error messages
email message transmis-
sions, 127
Link Dead, 377
errors
domain name servers,
371-375
email transmissions,
126-127
HTML, 511
InterSLIP, 379-382
MacPPP, 375-379
MacTCP, 368-370
escape codes(URLs), 115
Ethernet, 677
etiquette
email, 119
FTP, 162
mailing lists, 66-67
etx filename extension, 196, 677
Eudora email program,
276-281, 385-396
Balloon Help, 395
configurations, 388, 592-594
installation, 277-281,
387-390
ISKM disk
configuration, 305
installation, 309
launching, 592-594
mailboxes, 393
Mailboxes window, 389
mailing lists, 281
Message window, 393
Nickname window, 389
operating modes, 390-394
Pref file utilities, 402
script utilities, 402
setup, 277-281, 387-390
Signature window, 389
special features, 395-396
Eudora SFU utility, 282
Europa Communications, Inc.
service provider, 619-620
Index
696 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
eWorld
connections, 247
cost, 247
email support, 246-247
Internet connections, 245
Internet services, 245-247
Web page, 247
ExchangeNet service
provider, 622
Expand Now utility, 193
exporting Netscape Navigator
browser bookmarks, 474
external graphics (Web pages),
507-511
F
FAQs (Frequently Asked
Questions), 677
Farallon, Inc. customer service
number, 548
faxes, 677
feeds, 677
Fetch client program
Anarchie bookmark
compatibility, 449
bookmarks, 446
cost, 449
downloading files, 448
installation, 444-445
operating modes, 445-448
setup, 444-445
special features, 448-449
Fidonet, 677
file mappings (Internet Config
program), 527
file servers, 677
file sites, 33, 677
file storage fees, service pro-
viders, 209
File Transfer Protocol, see FTP
filename extensions, 677
files
attaching to email
messages, 122
binary, 673
compression, 675
downloading
with Fetch client pro-
gram, 448
with News Watcher
newsreader, 413
with TurboGopher,
92, 455
finding, 90-94
formats
ASCII, 186-190
AVI, 200
BinHex, 187-188
btoa, 189
Compact Pro, 192
compression, 190-194
DOS compression, 194
GIF, 198
graphics, 198-199
gzip, 193
HTML, 197
JPEG, 199
MacBinary, 682
MPEG, 199
QuickTime, 200
self-extracting
archives, 192
setext, 196-197
sound, 199
Stufflt 3.0, 191
Ulaw, 199
Unix compression,
192-193
uucode, 188-189, 689
video, 199-200
FTP sites
downloading via
Anarchie, 438, 605
downloading via email,
164-168
downloading via mailing
list managers, 168
format queries, 164
viewing, 163
graphics, 198-199
self-extracting archive, 686
sound, 199
text, 194-197
uploading
to Internet sites, 195
with Anarchie, 442
URLs, 112
video, 199-200
finding
files, 90-94
mailing lists, 64
users, 53, 131-133
Finger program, 538-542, 678
firewalls, 678
FirstClass BBSs, 262-264
FirstClass TCP Setup dialog
box, 263
FishNet, Prometheus Informa-
tion Corp. ser\dce
provider, 625
flaming, 20, 121, 678
flat-rate accounts (service
providers), 208-209
Florida Online service
provider, 628
Flow Control pop-up menu
(MacPPP), 338
folders (downloaded files), 525
follow-up messages (Usenet
newsgroups), 157
fonts
email messages,
viewing, 128
Internet Config
program, 527
monospaced, 683
proportionally spaced, 685
uploading text files, 195
foreign service providers,
661-666
formats
commercial service pro-
vider addresses, 218
files
ASCII, 186-190
AVI, 200
BinHex, 187-188
btoa, 189
Index 697
Compact Pro, 192
compression, 190-194
DOS compression, 194
GIF, 198
graphics, 198-199
gzip, 193
HTML, 197
JPEG, 199
MacBinary, 682
MPEG, 199
QuickTime, 200
self-extracting
archives, 192
setext, 196-197
sound, 199
Stufflt 3.0, 191
Ulaw, 199
Unix compression,
192-193
uucode, 188-189, 689
video, 199-200
forms (WWW), 678
forwarding email
messages, 130
FrameMaker HTML authoring
program, 514
free service providers, 637
Freenet, 678
freeware, 11, 678
FTP (File Transfer Protocol),
11, 33-34, 678
America Online access,
227-230
client programs, 163-164
Anarchie, 436-443
Archie, 169-171
CompuServe access,
241-243
directories, 215
files
downloading via America
Online, 229
downloading
viaAnarchie, 438, 605
ISKM disk configur-
ations, 306
Kermit, 681
mailservers, 166-167
mirror sites, 33, 682
sites
AddMail email utility, 401
America Online
registration, 220
America Online
software, 233
Anarchie client
program, 443
Apple Modem Tool
(Eudora), 280
Apple technical
support, 382
AppleScript, 548
ARA scripts, 355
Bolo (game), 535
bookmarks, 163
CCL scripts (Inter-
SLIP), 355
Chunkjoiner utility
access, 247
Comet program
(Telnet), 532
Communications
Toolbox, 277
Compact Pro, 192
connections, 163
CU-SeeMe
videoconferencing
program, 545
DOS compression
utilities, 194
Dungeons & Dragons, 537
Easy View email utility,
197, 402
email programs, 396
email utilities, 400, 404
Eudora documentation,
277, 396
Eudora email program,
386, 392
Eudora plug-ins, 277
Eudora scripting, 395
Fa ration software, 548
Fetch client program, 450
file queries, 164
Finger program, 539
FirstClass BBS client
software, 264
FTP client programs, 450
game programs, 534
gateway scripts
(InterSLIP), 356
Global Village
software, 378
graphic formatting
utilities, 501
HTML authoring
programs, 514
Hytelnet program, 540
Internet Config
program, 529
InterSLIP, 361
InterSLIP 1.02d2
program, 363
ISKM disk, 571
JPEG utilities, 199
MacGzip utility, 193
MacPPP, 342-343
MacTCP documen-
tation, 313
MacTCP utilities, 323
MacTCP Watcher, 368
MacWAIS, 535
MacWeb browser, 467
MailConverter utility, 259
maX.500 program, 541
Mosaic Web browser, 478
MPEG utilities, 200
MUDDweller game
program, 537
navigating, 163
NCSA Telnet, 532
Netscape Navigator
browser, 475
Netv^^ork Time
program, 542
NewsHopper news-
reader, 430
newsreaders, 430
Index
698 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
NewsWatcher
newsreader, 414
NewsWatcher-SFU utility
for Unix shell
accounts, 284
NovaLink BBS client
software, 266
Now Sofware compres-
sion utilities, 193
Nuntius newsreader, 421
POCIA Directory, 636
PowerTalk, 259
PowerTalk gateways, 398
QuickTime utilities, 200
real-time communication
programs, 542
ResEdit utility
(Eudora), 278
role-playing games, 537
RTF converters, 512
ShrinkWrap utility, 277
SignatureQuote
utility, 259
software, 534
sound file utilities, 199
sound /video file
archives, 508
Stufflt, 191
System 6 Eudora, 361
Talk communication
program, 544
TCP /Connect II support,
556-557
TCP /Connect II
program, 563
TCPack Telnet Tool, 235
TechMail email
program, 399
TeleFinder BBSs, 269
terminal emulation
programs, 285
Termy terminal
emulator, 281
text file spacing
utilities, 195
TGE TCP Tool, 533
TheNews utility for Unix
shell accounts, 284
TIA files, 276
TidBITS, 298
TN3270 program
(Telnet), 533
TurboGopher client
program, 458
TurboGopher VR client
program, 459
Unix compression
utilities, 192
Unix Navs template
(Eudora), 278
Unix shell utilities, 282
VersaTerm-Link support,
566-568
Web browser helper
applications, 479
XMODEM, 690
XTND converters, 513
YMODEM, 690
ZMODEM, 690
FTPmail, 164-165, 678
Full InterSLIP Install (ISKM
disk), 307-308
Full MacPPP Install (ISKM
disk), 307
future Internet development,
46-49
FYI (For Your Infor-
mation), 678
G
games
Bolo, 535
FTP sites, 534
MacFIBS, 536
MacMud, 536
MacMUSH, 536
MUDDweller, 537
NetRPG (D&D), 537
Outland service
provider, 250
role-playing, 537
Gateway pop-up menu
(InterSLIP), 356
gateway scripts (InterSLIP),
356, 678
gateways, 39-40, 678
GEnie, 249
GIF (Graphics Interchange
Format) files, 198,
500- 501, 678
GIFConverter utility, 503
Global OnLine service
provider, 631
Global Village software, 378
GNU operating system, 679
Gopher, 11, 34-35, 178-181, 679
America Online access,
230-231
Blue Skies client
program, 458
GopherSurfer client
program, 458
Jughead client program,
180-181
PNLInfo Browser client
program, 459
TCP/ Connect II support,
558-559
TurboGopher client pro-
gram, 453-458
TurboGopher VR client
program, 459
URLs, 115
Veronica client
program, 180
Gopher sites
Library of Congress, 27
TIA information files, 276
Gopherspace, 455, 679
GopherSurfer client program
(Gopher), 458
government regulation of the
Internet, 49
Graphic Converter utility,
501- 520
graphics
converting to GIF /JPEG,
501-503
files, 198-199
Index 699
formatting utilities, 501
HTML tags, 668
Web pages, 500-508
Graphics Interchange Format
(GIF), 198
Great Basin Internet Services,
Inc. service provider, 617-618
Green Card debacle
(spamming), 47
Gulf Coast Internet service
provider, 628
gzip file format, 193
H
handshaking (modems),
337, 373
Hangup on Close checkbox
(MacPPP), 336
hard close (MacPPP), 679
hardware (Internet connectiv-
ity ), 4-5, 20
hash mark (#), URLs, 116
Hawaii OnLine service
provider, 630
Hayes modem com-
patibility, 380
headers (email messages),
123-126, 679
Helix Internet service
provider, 631
home pages (WWW), 182, 679
see also Web pages;
WWW sites
HomeMaker HTML authoring
program, 517
Homer program (IRCs),
282, 546
horizontal rules (Web pages),
505-507
host computers, 20-21,
28-29, 679
see also servers
Hosts file (MacTCP), 322-323
hotlists
MaeWeb browser, 465
WWW, 611-612
HoTMetaL HTML authoring
program, 518
hqx filename extension,
187, 679
hrefs (Hypertextual
REFerences), 492
HTML (HyperText Markup
Language), 182, 197,
487-488, 679
add-on utilities, 513-516
converters, 512-513
copying, 509
tags, 486-496, 510-512,
667-670
troubleshooting, 511
HTML 3.0, 496
HTML Editor, authoring
program, 518
html filename extension, 487
HTML Pro, authoring pro-
gram, 518
HTML Web Weaver, authoring
program, 519
HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol), 113, 181, 679
httpd4Mac browser, 477-479
HyperFinger Pro program
(user info), 540
hypertext links, 36, 182, 679
HTML tags, 668
Web pages, 496-499
Hytelnet program, 540
I
1-2000, Inc. service
provider, 626
lAB (Internet Architecture
Board), 45, 680
IBM (International Business
Machines), 680
iCON service provider, 622
Idle Timeout pop-up menu
(MacPPP), 334
IETF (Internet Engineering
Task Force), 45, 680
iiNet Technologies Pty Ltd
service provider, 633
Illuminati Online service pro-
vider, 624-625
IMAP (Interactive Mail Access
Protocol), 398, 680
Info-Mac Server pop-up menu
(Internet Config), 525
information agents, 27-36,
537-542, 680
inline graphics (Web pages),
182, 504-505
installation
Anarchie client program,
436-437
Eudora email program,
277-281, 387-390
Fetch client program,
444-445
Internet Config
program, 523
InterSLIP, 316, 352-358,
583-584
ISKM disk, 300-309
MacPPP, 316, 333-341,
577-578
MacTCP, 315-321, 574
MaeWeb browser, 462-463
Netscape Navigator
browser, 468-470
NewsHopper newsreader,
421-425
NevvsWatcher newsreader,
408-411
Nuntius newsreader,
415-417
TIA, 274-276
Instant InterRamp, 251
insufficient memor}' error
message (MacPPP), 375
integrated Internet programs,
551-572
Integrated Services Digital
Network, see ISDN
Inter Relay Chats, see IRCs
InterAccess Co. service pro-
vider, 622-623
Interactive Graphics Renderer
utility, 503
Index
700 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
interlaced GIF files, 198, 474
Intemaut, 250
Internet Access Cincinnati
service provider, 622
Internet Access Company, Inc.
ser\ice provider, 627
Internet Config program
Archie server pop-up
menu, 525
configurations, 588-591
file mappings, 527
fonts, 527
FTP sites, 529
Info-Mac Server pop-up
menu, 525
installation, 523
ISKM disk installation, 309
operating modes, 523-528
setup, 523
UMich Server pop-up
menu, 525
Internet Connect Services
service provider, 620
Internet development, 37-49
Internet Interstate service
provider, 629
Internet Mail utility (Unix shell
accounts), 282
Internet News utility (Unix
shell accounts), 282
Internet Roadmap online
class, 272
intemelw'orks, 21, 680
InterNews newsreader, 431
Internode Professional Access
service provider, 633
InterPPP client program, 346
InterServe Communications,
Inc. service provider, 620
InterSLIP
add-on utilities, 362
CCL scripts, 355
configurations, 353, 584-587
Dial Script pop-up
menu, 354
features, 361
Gateway pop-up menu, 356
gateway scripts, 356, 678
installation, 316, 352-358,
583-584
Internet connections,
587-588
ISKM disk installation, 301,
307-308
operating modes, 358-359
setup, 352-358
software, 363-364
switching to MacPPP, 375
System 6 compatibility, 360
technical support, 361
troubleshooting, 366-368,
379-382
InterSLIP 1.02d2 program, 363
InterSLIP/ AE utility, 362
InterSource service
provider, 623
IP (Internet Protocol), 39, 680
IQuest service provider, 623
ircle program (IRCs), 546
IRCs (Inter Relay Chats), 68-76,
172, 680
channels, 172, 674
FTP sites, 542
Homer program, 546
ircle program, 546
WWW sites, 542
ISDN (Integrated Services
Digital Network), 22, 215
isis service provider, 631-632
ISKM (Internet Starter Kit
for Mac)
disk
contents, 571
Full InterSLIP Install,
307-308
Full MacPPP Install, 307
installation, 300-309
Web page, 299
ISOC (The Internet
Society), 680
J-K-L
JANET (Joint Academic
Network), 681
JPEG (Joint Photographic Ex-
perts Group) file format,
199, 681
Netscape Navigator
browser support, 474
Web pages, 500-501
Jughead client program, 35,
180-181, 681
Kermit (FTP), 681
Knowbot Information Service
(email), 133
LanMinds service
provider, 620
LANs (local area networks),
21, 681
launching
Anarchie client
program, 605
Eudora email program,
592-594
FirstClass BBSs, 262
MacWeb client
program, 607
NewsWatcher newsreader,
599-601
LavaNet, Inc. service
provider, 630
leaf sites, 681
LeeMail email program, 397
Leonardo Internet service
provider, 618
Library of Congress
Gopher site, 27
line noise (modems), 24, 681
linefeeds (text files), 196
Link Dead error message, 377
linking Web pages to other
Internet files, 498-499
links (HTML tags), 668
listing mailing list
subscribers, 141
Index 701
ListProcessor mailing lists, 142
lists (HTML tags), 669
LISTSERV mailing lists, 64,
134, 681
addresses, 138
etiquette, 66-67
file retrieval commands, 168
manager programs, 137-143
signal-to-noise ratios, 68
subscribing, 138
switching between mes-
sage/ digest formats, 142
see also mailing lists
ListSTAR utility (email), 403
local area networks, see LANs
LocalTalk, 682
log files (Anarchie client
program), 441
logins, 339, 682
long distance phone rates
(service providers), 210
lurking (newsgroups),
65-66, 682
Lynx browser (WWW), 26
M
Mac Ph program, 541
MacBinary file format, 682
MacFIBS game program, 536
MacGzip utility, 193
machine names (Internet ad-
dress domains), 107-108
Macintosh file sites, 33
MacMud game program, 536
MacMUSH game program, 536
MacNews utility (Unix shell
accounts), 283
MacPGP Kit (email), 403
MacPost email program, 398
MacPPP, 331
add-on utilities, 343-345
Authentication dialog
box, 339
configurations, 303-305,
578-581
Configure Server dialog
box, 337
Connect Script dialog
box, 340
connections, 341-342
Control PPP utility, 343
Flow Control pop-up
menu, 338
Hangup on Close
checkbox, 336
hard close, 679
installation, 316, 333-341,
577-578
insufficient memory error
message, 375
Internet connections,
581-583
ISKM disk installation, 301,
307-308
modem activity, 337
operating modes, 341-342
Port Speed pop-up
menu, 337
PPPop utility, 344
PPPquencer utility, 344
PPPReport utility, 345
QuicKeys utility, 344
Quiet Mode checkbox, 336
SAM anti-virus program
conflicts, 379
setup, 333-341
soft close, 687
Supra modem conflicts, 376
switching from
InterSLIP, 375
terminal emulators, 335
Timer utility, 344
Toggle PPP utility, 343
troubleshooting, 366-368,
375-379
upgrades, 342
MacPPP 2.1SD client
program, 345
MacPPP Control utility, 343
MacSLIP program, 363
MacSlurp newsreader, 431
MacSOUP utility (Unix shell
accounts), 283
MacTCP, 682
-23004 error message, 368
accounts, 315
addresses, 314
ARA, 346-348
client program errors, 370
CompuServe configura-
tions, 233
configuration dialog box,
317-319
configurations, 302, 306,
575-577
connections, 207-208, 313
control panel, 317
DNR file, 321-322, 369
domain name servers,
319-321, 371-375
DRVR 22 error message, 370
Hosts file, 322-323
installation, 315-321, 574
ISKM disk installation, 308
Main Window configura-
tions, 316-317
Prep file, 321-322, 369
reinstalling, 368, 370
service providers, 313
setup, 315-321
troubleshooting, 366-370
upgrading, 370
utilities, 323
MacWAIS, 535
MacWeather program, 541
MacWeb browser
Anarchie interoper-
ability, 466
browsing Web sites, 610
configurations, 607
hotlists, 465, 611-612
installation, 462-463
ISKM disk installation, 309
launching, 607
NewsWatcher
interoperability, 466
operating modes, 463-465
setup, 462-463
special features, 466-467
Web page, 464
Index
702 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
MacWW'W browser, 477-479
magazines (electronic
publishing), 98-100
Magic Online Services Inc.
service provider, 632
mail bombing, 48, 682
Mail Processor utility
(email), 404
mail, see email
MaiPLink Internet for
PowerTalk email
program, 398
mailboxes (Eudora), 393
Mailboxes window
(Eudora), 389
MailConverter program, 224,
258, 404
MailDrop email program, 398
mailing lists, 14, 30, 682
administrators, 139
Apple Internet Users,
342, 367
digests, 136-137
etiquette, 66, 66-67
Eudora, 281
finding, 64
listing subscribers, 141
ListProcessor, 142
Majordomo, 143
manager programs,
137-143, 168
messages, 136-137
moderators, 135-136, 683
Politics, 64
posting messages, 139
Risks Digest, 95
signal-to-noise ratios, 68
signing off, 141
subscribing, 138-140,
223, 596
unmoderated, 135-136
unsubscribing, 142
Usenet, 31
vs. newsgroups, 134, 146
WWW interests, 520
WWW site, 65
see also LISTSERV
mailing lists
mailservers, 30, 166, 682
MailShare utility (email), 404
Majordomo mailing lists,
134, 143
Managing Internet Information
Services, 21
manual pages (Unix), 682
marking newsgroup
messages, 155
Maven audioconferencing
program, 546
maX.500 program, 541
MCC (Microelectronics and
Computer Technology Cor-
poration), 682
MCI customer service
number, 211
Meeting Space program, 547
MenuDropper utility, 91
Message window
(Eudora), 393
Microphone Pro program,
282, 571
Microphone terminal
emulator, 285
Microsoft Word, coding HTML
documents, 514-515
mid-level domains (Internet
addresses), 106-107
Milnet (Military Network), 39
MIME (Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions), 682
MindSpring Enterprises, Inc.
service provider, 628-629
mirror sites (FTP), 33, 682
MobiusNet service
provider, 621
modems, 4, 22-25, 683
baud rates, 673
dialup, 676
handshaking, 373
Hayes compatibility, 380
initialization strings, 338
Internet connection
conflicts, 377
InterSLIP
baud rate settings, 353
errors, 381
MacPPP activity, 337
software flow control, 338
Supra (MacPPP
conflicts), 376
V.34 protocol, 689
moderated mailing lists,
135-136
moderators (mailing lists/
newsgroups), 45-46, 683
monospaced fonts, 683
Mosaic browser, 477-479
Mosaic client program, 78
Mpack utility (email), 405
MPEG (Motion Picture Experts
Group) file format, 199,
509, 683
MTU (Maximum Transmission
Unit), SLIP, 683
MUDDweller game
program, 537
MUDs (Multi-User Dimen-
sions/Dungeons), 73-76,
172-174, 536, 683
MX (Mail Exchange)
records, 683
N
named entities (Web
pages), 494
National Research and Educa-
tion Network (NREN), 42
National Science Foundation
Network (NSFNET), 41-42
national service providers,
637-661
na\dgating
email messages, 128-129
FTP sites, 163
Gopherspace, 455
Usenet newsgroups,
154-155
Navigator program, optimiz-
ing CompuServe, 235
Index 703
NaviPress HTML authoring
program, 519
NCSA (National Center for
Supercomputing Applica-
tions), 683
Mosaic browser, 477-479
Telnet, 529-537
FTP sites, 532
operating modes, 530-531
special features, 531
NeoSoft, Inc. service
provider, 625
NetPhone audioconferencing
program, 547
NetRPG (D&D) game
program, 537
Netscape Navigator browser
bookmarks, 468-474
configurations, 468-470
cost, 475
installation, 468-470
interlaced GIF file
support, 474
newsreader functions, 471
operating modes, 470-473
setup, 468-470
special features, 473-475
Net Wings browser, 478-479
Network Information
Center, 683
Network Time program, 542
Network Time Protocol, 683
networks
administrators, 45
Internet connectivity, 21-22
Internet links, 20
time servers, 683
NewsFetcher newsreader,
431-432
NewsGrazer newsreader, 432
newsgroups, 10, 31, 684
addresses, 147-149
America Online access,
225-227
Bolo (game), 535
categories, 147
CFV, 152
charters, 152, 674
ClariNet, 159
CompuServe access,
238-241
copyright infringe-
ments, 158
creating, 151-153
cross-posting messages, 675
downloading binary
files, 156
FirstClass BBSs, 263
follow-up messages, 157
InterNews newsreader, 431
ISKM disk configur-
ations, 306
lurking, 65-66
MacSlurp newsreader, 431
mailing list profiles, 64
marking messages, 155
message expiration, 31
moderators, 683
navigating, 154-155
NewsFetcher newsreader,
431-432
NewsGrazer news-
reader, 432
NewsHopper newsreader,
421-430
NewsWatcher newsreader,
407-414, 598-604
NNTP Sucker new^s-
reader, 432
Nuntius newsreader,
415-421
posting messages, 146,
149-151, 158-159, 603-604
reading messages, 153-154,
602-603
replying to messages, 150,
156-157
RFDs, 152
rotl3, 155-156
subscribing, 153, 601-602
TCP /Connect II support,
555-556
TheNews newsreader, 433
threads, 146, 154, 688
VA-News Watcher
newsreader, 433
VersaTerm-Link support,
565-566
vs. mailing lists, 146
see also Usenet newsgroups
NewsHopper newsreader
installation, 421-425
operating modes, 425-428
setup, 421-425
special features, 428-430
newsletters, 96-97
newsrc filename extension, 684
newsreaders (Usenet
newsgroups), 150,
153-154, 684
InterNews, 431
MacSlurp, 431
Netscape Navigator
browser, 471
NewsFetcher, 431-432
NewsGrazer, 432
NewsHopper, 421-430
NewsWatcher, 407-414,
598-604
NNTP Sucker, 432
Nuntius, 415-421
TheNews, 433
VA-NewsWatcher, 433
NewsWatcher newsreader, 407
configurations, 599-601
installation, 408-411
launching, 599-601
operating modes, 411-413
setup, 408-411
special features, 413-414
NewsWatcher-SFU utility
(Unix shell accounts), 284
Nickname window
(Eudora), 389
nicknames, 684
Nisus Writer HTML authoring
program, 515
nixpub list (Unix shell
accounts), 206
Index
704 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
NNTP (Net News Transport
Protocol), 684
NNTP Sucker newsreader, 432
nodenames, 684
Norstad, John, 61-63
North Bay Network service
provider, 618
North Shore Access ser\dce
provider, 626
Northwest Nexus Inc. service
provider, 621
NotifyMail utility (email), 405
NovaLink Professional BBSs,
265-266
Now Compress utility, 193
NREN (National Research and
Education Network), 42, 684
NSF (National Science Founda-
tion), 684
NSFNET (National Science
Foundation Network), 41-42
number sign (#), URLs, 116
Nuntius newsreader
installation, 415-417
operating modes, 417-420
setup, 415-417
special features, 420
o
offline, 684
OlympusNet service
provider, 621
online, 684
online services, 217-259
see also commercial service
providers; service
providers
Open Transport program,
326-328
operating modes
Anarchic client program,
437-440
Eudora email program,
390-394
Fetch client program,
445-448
Finger program, 538-539
Internet Config program,
523-528
InterSLIP, 358-359
MacPPP, 341-342
MacWeb browser, 463-465
NCSA Telnet, 530-531
Netscape Navigator
browser, 470-473
NewsHopper newsreader,
425-428
NewsWatcher newsreader,
411-413
Nuntius newsreader,
417-420
Talk program, 543-544
TurboGopher client pro-
gram, 453-457
operating systems
DOS, 676
GNU, 679
Internet connectivity, 4
TIA compatibility, 275
VMS, 689
O'Reilly & Associates, 21
Outland, 250
p
PageMaker HTML authoring
program, 515
paired tags (HTML), 487
Panix Public Access Networks,
Corp. service provider, 626
PAP (Password Authentication
Protocol), 304, 339
Parameter RAM (PRAM), 374
PEP (Packetized Ensemble
Protocol), 684
per-hour accounts (service
providers), 209
Ph protocol, 541
Phone Book ser\'ers
(email), 133
phone charges (service provid-
ers), 210-212
phone lines (Internet connec-
tivit}^/ 22-25
picons (Web pages), 505
Pipeline Intemaut, 250
pit filename extension, 194
PNLInfo Browser client
program (Gopher), 459
POCIA (Providers of Commer-
cial Internet Access)
Directory, 635
Point-to-Point Protocol,
see PPP
Politics mailing list, 64
POP (Post Office Protocol),
277, 684
POPmail email program, 399
Port Name pop-up menu
(MacPPP), 334
Port Speed pop-up menu
(MacPPP), 337
Portal Information Network
service provider, 630
ports (servers), 28, 684
posting
mailing list messages, 139
newsgroup messages,
146-151, 158-159, 603-604
PowerBook (MacPPP modem
connections), 375
PowerTalk gateways, 259, 398
PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol),
329-331, 685
accounts, 331-332
CompuServe configura-
tions, 234
servers, 339
vs. SLIP, 330
see also MacPPP
PPPop utility (MacPPP), 344
PPPquencer utility
(MacPPP), 344
PPPReport utility
(MacPPP), 345
PRAM (Parameter RAM), 374
Prep file (MacTCP),
321-322, 369
Primenet Services for the
Internet (service
provider), 618
Prodigy, 250
Index 705
programs
Chat, 544
client/server computing,
25-26
Co-motion Lite for
Internet, 545
Comet (Telnet), 532
CU-SeeMe
(videoconferencing), 545
Daemon (user info), 540
email, 127-131
Eudora (email), 592-594
Finger, 538-542, 678
Homer (IRCs), 546
HyperFinger Pro (user
info), 540
Hytelnet, 540
information agents,
537-542, 680
Internet Config, 521-529,
588-591
InterSLIP, 352-363
ircle (IRCs), 546
Mac Ph, 541
MacSLIP, 363
MacWeather, 541
MailConverter, 224
Maven (audioconfer-
encing), 546
maX.500, 541
Meeting Space, 547
Microphone Pro, 571
Navigator (optimizing
CompuServe), 235
NetPhone
(audioconferencing), 547
Network Time, 542
Open Transport, 326-328
real-time communication,
542-547
Talk, 543-549
TCP/Connect II, 552-563
terminal emulation, 284-287
TN3270 (Telnet), 533
uudecode, 689
uuencode, 689
VersaTerm SLIP, 364
VersaTerm-Link, 563-570
Whois, 53
worms, 690
see also utilities
Project Gutenberg, 98
proportionally spaced
fonts, 685
protocols, 685
DHCP, 326
FTP, 33-34, 161-171, 678
HTTP, 181, 679
IMAP, 398, 680
IP, 39, 680
Kermit (FTP), 681
Network Time Protocol, 683
NNTP, 684
PAP, 304, 339
PEP, 684
Ph, 541
POP, 277, 684
PPP, 685
SLIP, 686
SMTP, 277, 687
TCP, 687
TCP/IP, 21, 687
Telnet, 32, 171
URL schemes, 112
UUCP, 22, 689
V.34 (modems), 689
WAIS, 174-178
XMODEM (FTP), 690
YMODEM (FTP), 690
ZMODEM (FTP), 690
public domain software, 685
punctuation
America Online email, 223
Internet addresses, 109-110
Usenet newsgroup ad-
dresses, 147
Q
QuarkXPress HTML authoring
program, 516
question mark (?), URLs, 116
QuicKeys utility (MacPPP), 344
QuickTime, 685
uploading files, 200
Web page links, 509
Quiet Mode checkbox
(MacPPP), 336
quoting (messages), 685
R
ranking (WAIS), 175, 685
reading
email messages, 127-128,
597-598
Usenet newsgroups,
153-154, 602-603
real-time communication
programs, 542-547
Red River Net service pro-
vider, 623
regional service providers,
638-661
registering Web pages, 512
reinstalling MacTCP, 368, 370
relative URLs, 497
relevance feedback (WAIS), 95,
175, 685
replying
email messages, 129-130,
597-598
Usenet newsgroup mes-
sages, 150, 156-157
ResEdit utility (Eudora), 278
restricted flat-rate account
(service providers), 208
RFCs (Requests for Comment),
Internet sites, 29
RFDs (Requests for Discus-
sion), Usenet news-
groups, 152
Risks Digest mailing list, 95
role-playing games
(FTP sites), 537
root directories, 686
rotl3 encryption (Usenet
newsgroups), 155-156, 686
RTF (Rich Text Format),
512-513
Index
706 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
S
SAM anti-virus program
(MacPPP conflicts), 379
SaskTel service provider, 632
Script Daemon utility, 549
sea niename extension,
192, 686
searching Internet sites, 90
searching agents (WWW
site), 183
self-extracting archive file
format, 192, 686
semicolon (;), URLs, 115
sending email
from America Online,
223-225
from AppleLink, 248
from CompuServe, 238
from Delphi, 249
from eWorld, 246
from FirstClass BBSs, 264
from GEnie, 249
from Prodigy, 251
to President Clinton, 594
with Eudora, 390-394
servers, 28-29, 677, 686
Archie, 170-171
BITFTP, 166
domain name, 314, 319
Gopher, 179
ports, 28
PPP, 339
URL schemes. 111
Veronica, 180
WAIS, 174-178
Web pages, 486
see also host computers
service providers, 43-45,
204-205
800 numbers, 212
a2i communications, 619
ABWAM, Inc., 624
Angel Networks, Inc., 625
BBSs, 205
BIX, 673
business services, 216
Cinenet Communications,
Inc., 617
commercial, 217-219
America Online, 219-233
AppleLink, 248
BIX, 248
CompuServe, 233-244, 675
Delphi, 249
email utilities, 252-259
eWorld, 244-247
GEnie, 249
Outland, 250
Pipeline Intemaut, 250
Prodigy, 250
TCP/ Connect II, 251
cost, 208-212
CSDC, 619
custom domain names, 214
EarthLink Network,
Inc., 617
email aliases, 215
Europa Communications,
Inc., 619-620
ExchangeNet, 622
file storage fees, 209
FishNet, Prometheus Infor-
mation Corp., 625
flat-rate accounts, 208-209
Florida Online, 628
foreign, 661-666
free, 637
FTP directory access, 215
Global OnLine, 631
Gulf Coast Internet, 628
Great Basin Internet Ser-
vices, Inc., 617-618
Hawaii OnLine, 630
Helix Internet, 631
1-2000, Inc., 626
iCON, 622
iiNet Technologies Pty
Ltd, 633
Illuminati Online, 624-625
InterAccess Co., 622-623
Internet Access Cin-
cinnati, 622
Internet Access Company,
Inc., 627
Internet Connect
Services, 620
Internet Interstate, 629
Intemode Professional
Access, 633
InterServe Communica-
tions, Inc., 620
InterSource, 623
IQuest, 623
ISDN support, 215
isis, 631-632
LanMinds, 620
LavaNet, Inc., 630
Leonardo Internet, 618
long distance phone
rates, 210
MacTCP, 207-208
Magic Online Services
Inc., 632
MindSpring Enterprises,
Inc., 628-629
MobiusNet, 621
national, 637-661
NeoSoft, Inc., 625
North Bay Network, 618
North Shore Access, 626
Northwest Nexus Inc., 621
OlympusNet, 621
Panix Public Access Net-
works, Corp., 626
per-hour accounts, 209
phone charges, 210-212
Portal Information Net-
work, 630
Primenet Services for the
Internet, 618
Red River Net, 623
regional, 638-661
restricted flat-rate
accounts, 208
SaskTel, 632
ServiceTech, Inc., 626-627
SpaceNet GmbH, 633
startup fees, 209
SunBelt.Net, 629
technical support, 213-214
hidex 707
Telerama Public Access
Internet, 627
Tezcat Communi-
cations, 623
toll-free, 638-661
Traverse Communication
Company, 624
UltraNet Communications,
Inc., 627-628
Unix shell accounts, 205-206
UUCP, 206-207
Web page access, 215
WestNet Internet
Ser\nces, 628
Whidbey Connections,
Inc., 621
Worldwide Access, 624
WWW sites, 615-633
zNET, 619
ServiceTech, Inc. service
provider, 626-627
setext (Structure-enhanced
text) file format, 196-197, 686
setup
Anarchie client program,
436-437
Eudora email program,
277-281, 387-390
Fetch client program,
444-445
Internet Config
program, 523
InterSLIP, 352-358
MacPPP, 333-341
MacTCP, 315-321
MacWeb browser, 462-463
Netscape Navigator
browser, 468-470
NewsHopper newsreader,
421-425
NewsWatcher newsreader,
408-411
Nuntius newsreader,
415-417
SF (Standard File)
dialog box, 687
SGML (Structured Generalized
Markup Language), 486
shareware, 11, 686
shell accounts (Unix), 205-206,
271-272
Eudora email program,
276-281
Eudora SFU utility, 282
Homer utility, 282
Internet Mail utility, 282
Internet News utility^ 282
MacNews utility, 283
MacSOUP utility, 283
NewsWatcher-SFU
utility, 284
terminal emulation
programs, 284-287
TheNews utility, 284
TIA (The Internet Adapter),
272-276
Shrink Wrap utility, 277
signal-to-noise ratios (mailing
lists), 68
Signature Randomizer utility
(email), 405
Signature window
(Eudora), 389
SignatureQuote utility, 259
signatures (email), 117-118, 686
signing off of mailing lists, 141
single tags (HTML), 487
sit filename extension, 191, 686
SITcomm terminal
emulator, 286
sites
archive, 672
browsing, 76-88
file, 677
FTP
AddMail email utility, 401
America Online registra-
tion, 220
America Online
software, 233
Anarchie client
program, 443
Apple Modem Tool
(Eudora), 280
Apple technical
support, 382
AppleScript, 548
ARA scripts, 355
Bolo (game), 535
CCL scripts (Inter-
SLIP), 355
Chunkjoiner utility
access, 247
Comet program
(Telnet), 532
Communications
Toolbox, 277
Compact Pro, 192
connections, 163
CU-SeeMe
videoconferencing
program, 545
DOS compression
utilities, 194
Dungeons & Dragons, 537
Easy View email utility,
197, 402
email programs, 396
email utilities, 400, 404
Eudora documentation,
277, 396
Eudora email program,
386, 392
Eudora plug-ins, 277
Eudora scripting, 395
Farallon softu^are, 548
Fetch client program, 450
Finger program, 539
FirstClass BBS client
software, 264
FTP client programs, 450
game programs, 534
gateway scripts
(InterSLIP), 356
Global Village
software, 378
graphic formatting
utilities, 501
Index
708 Internel Starter Kit for Macintosh
HTML authoring
programs, 514
Hytelnet program, 540
Internet Config
program, 529
InterSLIP, 361
InterSLIP 1.02d2
program, 363
ISKM disks, 571
JPEG utilities, 199
MacGzip utility, 193
MacPPP add-on
utilities, 343
MacPPP upgrades, 342
MacTCP documen-
tation, 313
MacTCP utilities, 323
MacTCP Watcher, 368
MacWAIS, 535
MacWeb browser, 467
MailConverter utility, 259
Mosaic Web browser, 478
MPEG utilities, 200
MUDDweller game
program, 537
navigating, 163
NCSA Telnet, 532
Netscape Navigator
browser, 475
Network Time
program, 542
NewsHopper news-
reader, 430
newsreaders, 430
NewsWatcher
newsreader, 414
NewsWatcher-SFU utility
for Unix shell
accounts, 284
NovaLink BBS client
software, 266
Now Sofware compres-
sion utilities, 193
Nuntius newsreader, 421
POCIA Directory, 636
PowerTalk, 259, 398
QuickTime utilities, 200
real-time communication
programs, 542
ResEdit utility
(Eudora), 278
role-playing games, 537
RTF converters, 512
ShrinkWrap utility, 277
SignatureQuote
utility, 259
software, 534
sound file utilities, 199
sound /video file
archives, 508
Stufflt, 191
System 6 Eudora, 361
Talk communication
program, 544
TCP/ Connect II
program, 563
TCPack Telnet Tool, 235
TechMail email
program, 399
TeleFinder BBSs, 269
terminal emulation
programs, 285
Termy terminal
emulator, 281
text file spacing
utilities, 195
TGE TCP Tool, 533
TheNews utility for Unix
shell accounts, 284
TIA files, 276
TidBits, 298
TN3270 program
(Telnet), 533
TurboGopher client
program, 458
TurboGopher VR client
program, 459
Unix compression
utilities, 192
Unix Navs template
(Eudora), 278
Unix shell utilities, 282
video file archives, 508
Web browser helper
applications, 479
XTND converters, 513
Gopher
Library of Congress, 27
TIA information files, 276
leaf, 681
mirror, 682
Telnet
TIA information files, 276
Weather Underground, 32
WWW
ARA MacTCP, 346
bad Web pages, 493
BlitzMail email
program, 397
browsing, 610
Clay Basket browser, 476
CompuServe, 244
CU-SeeMe
videoconferencing
program, 545
Delphi, 249
Dilbert, 464
eWorld, 247
Farallon software, 548
Fetch client program, 450
FirstClass BBSs, 263
GEnie, 249
horizontal rules (Web
pages), 506
HTML 3.0, 496
HTML authoring pro-
grams, 514
HTML tags, 496
Interactive Graphics
Renderer utility, 503
Internet Roadmap online
class, 272
Internet Starter Kit for
Mac, 299
Internet users, 16
Internet Web re-
sources, 520
Index 709
InterPPP client
program, 346
IRCs, 542
ISKM disks, 571
MacMUSH, 536
MacPGP Kit, 403
MacWWW browser, 477
MailDrop email
program, 399
mailing lists, 65
MailShare email
utility, 404
named entities, 494
NetPhone
audioconferencing
program, 547
Netscape Navigator
browser, 475
NetWings Web
browser, 478
NewsHopper news-
reader, 430
Nuntius newsreader, 421
Outland software, 250
picons, 505
Pipeline Intemaut, 250
Prodigy, 251
PSI, 251
searching agents, 183
service providers, 615-633
Software Ventures, 283
sound file recording, 508
Star Nine, 403
TCP /Connect II program,
251, 563
TIA information files, 276
Web page feedback, 512
Web page regi-
stration, 512
Web serv^ers, 487
WebSTAR browser, 479
Wired, 98
Wired magazine, 173
XTND converter, 513
Z-Mail, 400
slash (/), URLs, 113
SLIP, 349-350, 686
accounts, 351
connections, 359-360
emulating with TLA for
Unix shell accounts, 273
MTU (Maximum Transmis-
sion Unit), 683
timeouts, 688
smileys, 120, 686
SMTP (Simple Mail Transport
Protocol), 277, 687
snail mail, 687
Snatcher client program, 163
soft close (MacPPP), 687
software, 11
America Online, down-
loading, 220
client/ server computing,
25-26
CompuServe, 234-235
FTP sites, 534
Global Village, 378
InterSLIP, 363-364
Outland, 250
public domain, 685
software flow control
(modems), 338
Software Ventures, Inc,
283, 571
sorting Eudora mailboxes, 395
sound files, 199, 508-509
SpaceNet GmbH service
provider, 633
spambots, 48
spamming, 47, 687
Sparkle utility, 200
special characters (HTML
tags), 669
Spider Island Software, 269
Sprint customer service
number, 211
StarNine Web page, 403
startup fees (service
providers), 209
static addresses, 687
Storyspace HTML authoring
program, 516
Strip Module utility
(InterSLIP), 362
stubs (compressed files), 192
Stuffit 3.0 file format, 191
Stuffit Expander (ISKM disk
installation), 309
subscribing
LISTSERV mailing lists, 138
mailing lists, 223, 596
newsgroups, 153, 601-602
via America Online, 226
with NewsHopper
newsreader, 422
TidBlTS mailing list, 596
SunBelt.Net service
provider, 629
Supra modems (MacPPP
conflicts), 376
Synergy, Inc customer service
number, 570
System 6 (InterSLIP com-
patibility), 360
T
T1 network links, 687
T3 network links, 687
tags (HTML), 486-487
document organization, 667
external graphics, 507-511
graphics, 668
testing, 510-512
hypertext links, 496-499, 668
lists, 669
special characters, 669
typography, 669
Talk program, 543-549
Tar (Tape ardiive) utility, 193
tar filename extension, 193
TCP, 687
TCP/ Connect II program, 251,
552-563
TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol / Internet Protocol),
21, 687
TCP/IP Scripting Addition
utility, 548
TCP/IP services, 161-184
Index
710 Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
TCPack Telnet Tool, 235
TechMail email program, 399
technical support
InterSLIP, 361
service providers, 213-214
TeleFinder BBSs, 266-269
telephone charges (service
providers), 210-212
telephone lines (Internet con-
nectivity), 22-25
Telerama Public Access
Internet service provider, 627
Telnet, 32, 171, 529-533, 687
Comet program, 532
CompuServe support, 241
NCSA Telnet, 529-537
sites
TIA information files, 276
Weather Underground, 32
TCP /Connect II
support, 558
TN3270 program, 533
VersaTerm-Link
support, 568
terminal emulation programs,
284-287, 688
MacPPP, 335
Termy terminal emulator,
281, 286
VersaTerm-Link, 563
Terminal Window checkbox
(MacPPP), 335
terminals, 688-689
Termy terminal emulator,
281, 286
testing HTML tags, 510-512
text, 688
ASCII characters, 672
HTML tags, 489-496
setext, 686
Web pages
ASCII characters, 494-495
formatted, 495-496
reserved characters, 495
styles, 492
text files, 194-197
Tezcat Communications
ser\dce provider, 623
TheNews newsreader, 433
TheNews utility (Unix shell
accounts), 284
threads (Usenet newsgroups),
146, 154, 688
TIA (The Internet Adapter),
206, 272-276
TidBlTS mailing list, 6, 688
email address, 30
Internet sites, 47
subscribing, 596
tilde (-«), URLs, 116
Timbuktu Pro utility, 548
timeouts (SLIP), 688
Timer utility
InterSLIP, 362
MacPPP, 344
TN3270 program (Telnet), 533
Toggle PPP utility, 343
toll-free service providers,
638-661
top-level domains (Internet
addresses), 104-106
Transcript window (Anarchie
client program), 442
Transmission Control Proto-
col / Internet Protocol, see
TCP/IP
Transparency 1.0 utility, 503
transparent GIF files, 198
Traverse Communication
Company service
provider, 624
troubleshooting
domain name server errors,
371-375
HTML, 511
Internet connections,
365-383
InterSLIP, 366-368, 379-382
MacPPP, 366-368, 375-379
MacTCP, 366-370
modems, 24
TurboGopher client
program, 179
bookmarks, 454
downloading files, 455
helper applications, 455
operating modes, 453-457
special features, 457
Veronica interoper-
ability, 456
TurboGopher VR client pro-
gram (Gopher), 459
two slashes (II), URL
schemes, 112
txt filename extension, 194
typographical tags (Web
pages), 492-493, 669
u
Ulaw file format, 199
UltraNet Communications,
Inc. service provider, 627-628
UMich Server pop-up menu
(Internet Config), 525
Uniform Resource Locators,
see URLs
University of Michigan
Weather Underground
Telnet, 32
Unix, 688
compression file formats,
192-193
compression utilities,
192-193
Internet servers, 21
manual pages, 682
shell accounts, 205-206,
271-287
Unix Navs template
(Eudora), 278
Unix-to-Unix CoPy, see UUCP
unmoderated mailing lists,
135-136
unsubscribing to mailing
lists, 142
upgrades
MacPPP, 342
MacTCP, 370
Index 711
uploading
files, 442, 688
QuickTime files, 200
text files, 195
upstream computers, 688
URLs (Uniform Resource Loca-
tors), 103, 111-113
copying into Anarchie, 441
Gopher, 115
relative, 497
using, 114-115
Usenet newsgroups, 31, 40, 688
addresses, 147-149
age /gender survey, 145
America Online access,
225-227
Bolo (game), 535
categories, 147
CFV, 152
charters, 152, 674
CompuServe access,
238-241
copyright infringe-
ments, 158
creating, 151-153
cross-posting messages, 675
downloading binary
files, 156
FirstClass BBSs, 263
follow-up messages, 157
InterNews newsreader, 431
ISKM disk configur-
ations, 306
lurking, 65-66
MacSlurp newsreader, 431
mailing list inventory, 64
marking messages, 155
moderators, 683
navigating, 154-155
NewsFetcher newsreader,
431-432
NewsGrazer news-
reader, 432
NewsHopper newsreader,
421-430
News Watcher newsreader,
407-414, 598-604
NNTP Sucker news-
reader, 432
Nuntius newsreader,
415-421
posting messages, 146-151,
158-159, 603-604
reading, 153-154, 602-603
replying to messages, 150,
156-157
RFDs, 152
rotl3, 155-156
subscribing, 153, 601-602
TCP /Connect II support,
555-556
TheNews newsreader, 433
threads, 146, 154, 688
VA-NewsWatcher
newsreader, 433
VersaTerm-Link support,
565-566
see also newsgroups
userids, 108-109, 688
usernames, 56-60, 108-109
users, 52-68
celebrities, 60-63
finding, 131-133
Fingering, 538
net alter egos, 56-60
newbies, 63
utilities
Add /Strip, 196
AddMail (email), 401
Autograph (email), 401
AutoShare (email), 401
Chunkjoiner, 247
clip2gif, 503
Compact Pro, 192
Control PPP (MacPPP), 343
DiskDoubler com-
pression, 193
DOS compression, 194
Drag Manager, 413, 448
Easy View (email), 197, 402
email, 252-259, 400-406
Eudora Scripts & Prefs, 402
Expand Now, 193
GIFConverter, 503
Graphic Converter, 501-520
Interactive Graphics
Renderer, 503
InterSLIP/AE, 362
JPEG files, 199
ListSTAR (email), 403
MacPGP Kit (email), 403
MacTCP, 323
Mail Processor (email), 404
MailConverter (email),
259, 404
MailShare (email), 404
Menu Dropper, 91
Mpack (email), 405
NotifyMail (email), 405
Now Compress, 193
Script Daemon, 549
self-extracting archives, 192
Signature Randomizer
(email), 405
sound files, 199
Sparkle, 200
Strip Module (Inter-
SLIP), 362
Stufflt, 191
TCP /Connect II
support, 561
TCP/IP Scripting
Addition, 548
text file spacing, 195
Timbuktu Pro, 548
Timer (InterSLIP), 362
Transparency 1.0, 503
Unix compression, 192-193
VacationMail (email), 406
VersaTerm-Link
support, 568
see also programs
uu filename extension, 188, 689
uucode file format,
188-189, 689
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy),
22, 206-207, 290, 671, 689
uudecode program, 689
uue filename extension, 689
uuencode program, 689
Index
712 Iniermi Starter Kit for Macintosh
V
V.34 modem protocol, 689
VA-NewsWatcher news-
reader, 433
VacationMail utility
(email), 406
Veronica client program, 35,
180, 689
America Online access, 231
TurboGopher
interoperability, 456
VersaTerm SLIP program, 364
VersaTerm terminal
emulator, 286
VersaTerm-Link program,
563-570
video files, 199-200, 508-509
videoconferencing (CU-SeeMe
program), 545
VideoMail email program, 399
viewing FTP files, 163
virtual ports (servers), 28
VMS operating system, 689
VTIOO terminals, 689
w
WAIS (Wide Area Information
Server), 11, 34, 55, 689
America Online access,
230-231
client programs, 533-534
copyright infringe-
ments, 177
Director}^ of Servers, 177
ranking, 175, 685
relevance feedback, 95,
175, 685
searches, 95
WANs (wide area
networks), 690
weather (MacWeather
program), 541
Weather Underground Telnet
site, 32
Web pages, 182
addresses, 491-492
ASCII characters, 494-495
browsing, 610
components, 488
CompuServe, 244
creating, 486-487
Delphi, 249
design considerations,
509- 510
Dilbert, 464
eWorld, 247
external graphics, 507-511
formatted text, 495-496
glossaries, 490-491
graphics, 500-508
horizontal rules, 505-507
HTVIL tags, 496-499,
510- 512
hypertext links, 496-499
inline graphics, 504-505
Internet distribution, 486
Internet Starter Kit for
Mac, 299
linking to other Internet
files, 498-499
lists, 490-491
MacMUSH game
program, 536
MacWeb browser, 464
MPEG movie links, 509
named entities, 494
paragraph/ line breaks, 489
QuickTime movie links, 509
quotations, 495
reader feedback, 511-512
registering, 512
reserved characters, 495
servers, 486
sound file links, 508-509
StarNine, 403
text styles, 492
topic headings, 489-490
t}‘pographical tags, 492-493
video file links, 508-509
see also WWW, sites
WebDoor Publisher HTML
authoring program, 519
WebSTAR browser, 478-479
WebSucker HTML authoring
program, 516
WebWizard HTML authoring
program, 515
WestNet Internet Services
service provider, 628
Whidbey Connections, Inc.
service provider, 621
White House, sending
email to, 594
Whois program, 53
Wide Area Information Server
(WAIS), 11
wildcards, 690
Wired magazine, 99, 173
Word, coding HTML
documents, 514-515
World Wide Web, see WWW
Worldwide Access service
provider, 624
worm programs, 690
WWW (World Wide Web),
35-36, 77, 181-184,
461-462, 690
America Online access, 232
browsers, 183, 674
Clay Basket, 476-479
ErJ-ianced Mosaic, 476-479
helper applications,
479-483
httpd4Mac, 477-479
Lynx, 26
MacWeb, 462-467
MacWWW, 477-479
Mosaic, 78
NCSA Mosaic, 477-479
Netscape Navigator,
467-475
NetWings, 478-479
WebSTAR, 478-479
browsing, 609-610
email access, 183
forms, 183, 678
home pages, 182
addresses, 491-492
ASCII characters, 494-495
Index 713
components, 488
creating, 486-487
design considerations,
509- 510
formatted text, 495-496
glossaries, 490-491
graphics, 500-508
horizontal rules, 505-507
hypertext links, 496-499
inline graphics, 504-505
linking to other Internet
files, 498-499
lists, 490-491
MPEG movie links, 509
named entities, 494
paragraph /line
breaks, 489
QuickTime movie
links, 509
quotations, 495
reader feedback, 511-512
registering, 512
reserved characters, 495
servers, 486
sound file links, 508-509
testing HTML tags,
510- 512
topic headings, 489-490
typographical tags,
492-493
video file links, 508-509
hotlists, 611-612
Internet resources, 520
MacWeb client program,
607-612
mailing lists, 520
sites
ARA MacTCP, 346
bad Web pages, 493
BlitzMail email
program, 397
browsing, 610
Clay Basket browser, 476
CompuServe, 244
CU-SeeMe
videoconferencing
program, 545
Delphi, 249
Dilbert, 464
eWorld, 247
Farallon software, 548
Fetch client program, 450
FirstClass BBSs, 263
GEnie, 249
horizontal rules (Web
pages), 506
HTML 3.0, 496
HTML authoring
programs, 514
HTML tags, 496
Interactive Graphics
Renderer utility, 503
Internet Roadmap online
class, 272
Internet Starter Kit for
Mac, 299
Internet users, 16
Internet Web re-
sources, 520
InterPPP client
program, 346
IRCs, 542
ISKM disks, 571
MacMUSH, 536
MacPGP Kit, 403
MacWWW browser, 477
MailDrop email
program, 399
mailing lists, 65
MailShare email
utility, 404
named entities (Web
pages), 494
NetPhone
audioconferencing
program, 547
Netscape Navigator
browser, 475
NetWings Web
browser, 478
NewsHopper news-
reader, 430
Nuntius newsreader, 421
Outland, 250
picons, 505
Pipeline Internaut, 250
Prodigy, 251
PSI, 251
searching agents, 183
service providers, 615-633
Software Ventures, 283
sound file recording, 508
StarNine, 403
TCP /Connect II program,
251, 563
TIA information files, 276
Web page feedback, 512
Web page regi-
stration, 512
Web servers, 487
WebSTAR browser, 479
Wired magazine, 100, 173
XTND converter, 513
Z-Mail, 400
TCP/ Connect II support,
559-561
URLs, 115
X-Y-Z
X.500 databases, 54, 541
XMODEM (FTP), 690
XTND converters, 513
YMODEM (FTP), 690
Z filename extension, 192, 690
z filename extension, 690
Z-Mail email program, 400
zip filename extension,
194, 690
ZMODEM (FTP), 690
zNET service provider, 619
ZTerm terminal emulator, 287
Index
The Internet Starter
Kit — on video!
Adam Engst, Internet expert and author
of several best-selling Internet books
(including this one), is your personal
coach in this step-by-step guide to the
Internet!
He shows you everything from hooking
up your modem to using Internet
software to find information,
communicate with others, and more.
Let Adam Engst show you how to
find things on the Internet that
match your interests and needs!
Only
$19.99 USA
See what you can do, where you can go,
and how to do it all yourself!
• Send and receive email
• Browse the World Wide Web
• Read Usenet newsgroups
• Search for specific information
• Download files and programs
• And more!
hidden
Books
For more information on the
Internet Starter Kit Video,
call 1-800-428-5331!
PLUG YOURSELF INTO...
The Macmillan Information SuperLibrary"
Free information and vast computer resources from
the world's leading computer book publisher— online!
FIND THE BOOKS THAT ARE RIGHT FOR YOU!
A complete online catalog, plus sample chapters and tables of contents give you an in-depth
look at allot our books, including hard-to-find titles. It's the best way to find the books you need!
• STAY INFORMED with the latest computer industry news through our online
newsletter, press releases, and customized Information SuperLibrary Reports.
• GET FAST ANSWERS to your questions about MCP books and software.
• VISIT our online bookstore for the latest information and editions!
• COMMUNICATE with our expert authors through e-mail and conferences.
• DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE from the immense MCP library:
- Source code and files from MCP books
- The best shareware, freeware, and demos
• DISCOVER HOT SPOTS on other parts of the Internet.
• WIN BOOKS in ongoing contests and giveaways!
WORLD WIDE WEB: http://www.mcp.com
GOPHER gopher.mcp.com
FTP: ftp.mcp.com
PLUG IN AND TURN ON!
Welcome to The Portal Information Network. If you want no-hassle Internet
access at the best price — at home, the office, and around the world — CHOOSE
PORTAL. Portal is the leading dialup Internet provider. We've been in business
for nine years and we focus exclusively on providing dialup Internet access.
BEST WORLDWIDE COVERAGE
No matter where you live or work, you can access the Internet through Portal.
That's because our nationwide network of 1,100 local access numbers and
150,000 modems gives us, by far, the best coverage. And for an estimated 95% of
the U.S. population, access to Portal is tlirough a local call.
ROAMING INTERNET ACCOUNTS
Portal lets you "roam," using the Internet. Wherever you go, your own Internet
account is there with you. Your software and Portal account continue to work
together to give you the same secured, personalized account access, across the
country or across the globe — wherever you roam!
THE MOST AFFORDABLE PRICE
Our regular rates are the lowest for true nationwide access. Sign up today, and
we'll give you an even better deal!
Regular Low Rates:
Signup charge: $19.95
Monthly charge: $19.95
Per hour: $2.95 using the CPN network
$2.50 using the SprintNet — offprime time
$9.50 using the SprintNet — prime time
SPECIAL OFFER: 30 DAYS FREE — sign up today and Portal will waive the
signup charge, the first monthly charge and credit your account $15 for online
time (a $55 value).’^
FILL OUT THE FORM ON BACK AND FAX TO PORTAL TODAY.
A valid credit card is required for activation. You will be charged the regular Portal rates after the $15 credit is used or after 30 days,
whichever comes first.
PORTAL
Portal Information Netw'ork
20863 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 200
Cupertino, CA 95014
408-973-9111 (voice), 408-725-1580 (fax)
sales@portal.com
PORT6L
Sign up today! Complete this form and fax to Portal: ( 408 ) 725-1580
Full Name: Hostname (1st clioice):
Address as it Hostname (2nd choice):
appears on ( minimum of 3 characters, maximum of 8)
credit card
statement:
Phone:
Fax:
Name as appears
on credit card:
Visa or MasterCard Only,
Credit Card Number:
Expiration Date:
I understand that 1 will be charged a monthly and hourly fee for usage, as outlined in the Portal
pricelist (prices are subject to change without notice). These charges will be incurred until I explicitly
close my account. I authorize Portal to apply these charges to my credit card. Other terms and
conditions are specified in the Portal User Agreement. I have received a copy of the agreement and
agree to the conditions within.
Signature:
Portal will send your complete account information within two days of receiving your application.
Portal User Agreement
This agreement is between you and The Portal Information Network, Incorporated (Portal). Your Portal account is for the use by one
person only, and you agree tlrat your password and any charges are your respoirsibility. You will be billed every month for your
Portal account, according to our currently published rates, until you explicitly close your account. If you choose to pay by credit card,
you authorize us to bill these charges to your card.
Portal is open to the public. You arc solely responsible for your usage of Portal and any entry you make on Portal may be deemed a
"publication" of the infonnation entered. Acknowledging the foregoing, you specifically agree not to use Portal in any way which is
illegal, libelous, profane, or indecent. You agree to conform to the rules and regulations of any networks which you may access
through your Portal account.
Portal reserves the right to make any changes to Portal and its content, and to refuse ser\'ice to anyone at any time.
This AgaH.*ment is effective when you first use Portal and continues until terminated by either party. You may cancel your account at
any time by notifying Portal. If this agreement is terminated you are still responsible for any charges on your account. The Portal
Information Network can change this Agreement at any time upon notice to you by electronic mail or other means. You may not
change or amend this agreement.
You agree to use Portal at your own risk. Portal specifically disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, including but not limited to
implied warranties of mercliantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall Portal be liable for any loss or profit or
any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Portal docs not control what people say or send. If you use what other people have entered into Portal, you arc responsible for how
you use that information. You agree to hold Portal, its employees or authorized agents harmless for any material placed on Portal by
any person not representing or acting officially on behalf of Portal.
This Agreement shall be governed and construed in accordance with the laws of California. You may not assign or transfer this
Agreement. This Agreement is the entire understanding between you and The Portal Information Network concerning Portal. Your
use of Portal constitutes agreement with these conditions.
INTERNET ST.ARTER KIT
Northwest Nexus Terms & Conditions
Terms and Conditions — Effective June 1, 1994
1. You understand and accept these Terms and Conditions and agree to pay for these services
according to the Billing Policies currently in effect.
2. If we do not receive your payment when due, your account may be terminated. Termination
of your account does not remove your responsibility under this agreement to pay all fees
incurred up to the date the account was canceled including any collection fees incurred by
Northwest Nexus Inc.
3. Northwest Nexus Inc. makes no warranties of any kind, whether expressed or implied,
including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness of this service for a particular
purpose. Northwest Nexus Inc. takes no responsibility for any damages suffered by you
including, but not limited to, loss of data from delays, nondeliveries, misdeliveries, or service
interruptions caused by Northwest Nexus's own negligence or your errors and/or omissions.
4. Northwest Nexus's services may only be used for lawful purposes. Transmission of any
material in violation of any US or state regulation is prohibited. This includes, but is not
limited to: copyrighted material, threatening or obscene material, or material protected by
trade secret. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Northwest Nexus Inc. from any
claims resulting from your use of this service which damages you or another party. At our
discretion, we may revoke your access for inappropriate usage.
5. Use of any information obtained via this ser\4ce is at your own risk. Northwest Nexus
specifically denies any responsibility for the accuracy' or quality of information obtained
through our services.
6. We may list your contact information in relevant directories.
7. If you use another organization's networks or computing resources, you are subject to their
respective permission and usage policies.
8. These Terms and Conditions are subject to change without notice. A current copy will always
be available online through our "help" facility. Continued usage of your account after a new
policy' has gone into effect constitutes acceptance of that policy'. We encourage you to
regularly check the policy statement for any changes. (The effective date at the top will be
updated to indicate a new revision.)
9. You will notify Northwest Nexus of any changes in account contact information such as your
address.
10. You are responsible for how your account is used. You may allow others to use it, bearing in
mind that you are fully responsible for what they do.
11. Per-session time limits are currently set at tw'o hours; y'ou may log back in after a two-hour
"offline" time. This applies to the halcyon . com machines only.
12. The use of IRC is not permitted on any of the halcyon . com machines. Currently, IRC clients
operating on users machines via SLIP/PPP are allowed.
13. Disk storage is limited to 5 megabytes. Excess storage is not permitted on the user drives; use
of /scratch for excess files is permitted. This applies only to the halcyon.com machines.
14. Northwest Nexus Inc. reser\'es the right to cancel this service and reimburse you with any
unused fees where appropriate on a pro-rata basis.
15. You may cancel your account at any time upon prior written notice to us. You will still be
responsible for any fees incurred up to the date of termination of the service. We will
reimburse you for any unused fees where appropriate on a pro-rata basis.
16. These Terms and Conditions supersede all previous representations, understandings, or
agreements and shall prevail notwithstanding any variance with terms and conditions of any
order submitted.
17. Some of the information available on our systems, such as ClariNews, is covered by copy-
right. Unless you have permission from the copyright holder, you are not allowed to
redistribute this information to others including use of this information on radio, television,
or printed media such as newspapers, magazines, or newsletters.
Northwest Nexus Internet Access Offer
What would a book about the Internet be if it didn't provide some means of getting on the Internet
for those people who aren't already connected? Not much, and to remedy that situation, Hayden
Books has worked out a deal for readers of this book with Northwest Nexus, Inc., a commercial
Internet provider based in Bellevue, Washington.
Northwest Nexus has created a flat-rate PPP account. You pay S20 to sign up and $22.50 per month
(billed in advance on a quarterly basis) for as many hours as you want to use it each month. In
addition, Northwest Nexus is making the first two weeks available for free. If after tw^o weeks you
don't want to keep the account for any reason, just call Northwest Nexus at 206-455-3505 and ask to
deactivate your account, at which point you pay nothing. (It's possible you may receive an auto-
matically generated bill before that time. Just call Northwest Nexus if that happens and they'll
straighten everything out for you.)
One thing to keep in mind is that you must call Northwest Nexus (in Washington State) to connect,
and that will be a long-distance phone call for every^one outside of the Puget Sound /Seattle area.
However, this is a good deal even with long-distance fees (and you can reduce long-distance calling
charges by using discount plans offered by your long distance carrier).
Details for setting up an account are provided in appendix A. The important fact is that after you set
the account up, you must send this page (not a copy!) to Northwest Nexus to confirm that you bought
this book. Just tear out the page and drop it in the mail. If you don't, you won't get the special deal,
so make sure you fill out and send in this page. It's not tough!
Please set up a PPP account for me!
Full Name:
Daytime Phone #:
Evening Phone #:
Address:
Requested Login:
Please cut out this page (Do not send a copy!) and mail it to:
Northwest Nexus Inc.
ATTN: Hayden Books Special Offer
P.O. Box 40597
Bellevue, WA 98015-4597
If you have questions, contact Northwest Nexus at 206-455-3505.
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh v/
Online Information
MacTCP Account
UmI
Hayden
Books
Addressing Style
(Manually, Server,
Domain Name
Server (default):
DvnamicallvV.
IP Address
Domain Name
Server (backup!:
(if Manually
addressedl:
SMTP Server:
Gateway Address
(if Manually
NNTP Server:
POP Account:
addressed!:
Network Class
(if Manually
addressed and
necessary!:
Email Address:
Connection Type
(PPP, SLIP, ARA,
Network!:
Subnet Mask
Phone Number:
(if Manually
Port Speed:
addressed and
necessary!:
Modem Init Strine:
Shell Accounts
Unix Host #1:
phone number/speed userid password modem init string
notes
Unix Host #2:
phone numbor/speed userid password modem init string
notes
Bulletin Board Accounts
BBS#1;
phone number/speed
userid
password
modem init string
notes
BBS #2:
phone numbor/speed userid password modem init string
notes
UUCP Account
Host:
phone number/speed
userid
password
modem init string
mail server name
news server name
Administrator's email address
notes
Note: Storing your passwords here could be a security breach. Only do so
if you are sure this won't be a problem.
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
Online Information
Commercial Online Services
Hayden
Books
America Online:
phone number/speed userid password mcdenn inil string
notes
AppleLink:
phone number/speed userid password modem init string
notes
BIX:
phone number/speed userid password modem inil string
notes
CompuServe:
phone number/speed userid password modem init string
notes
Delphi:
phone number/speed userid password modem init string
notes
eWorld:
phone number/speed userid password modem init string
notes
GEnie:
phone number/speed userid password modem inil string
notes
MCI Mail:
phone number/speed userid password rr.odem init string
notes
Outland:
phone number/speed userid password modem init string
notes
Prodigy:
phone number/speed userid password modem inil string
notes
Note: Storing your passwords here could be a security breach. Only do so
if you are sure this won't be a problem.
Pro
be the uHimate way for your
e-mail to cruise the Internet?
E-mail messages are like fish: You don't
want to let the big ones get away, but
you need to screen out the little stinky
ones. Eudora Pro has message filters
that you can pre-set to separate the
Big Mouths from the Barracudas.
Over two million Internet
users have given Eudora
their seal of approval.
With features like unlimited
mailboxes, built-in spell
checking, and the ability to
attach text, graphics and
video, it's no wonder why.
Eudora Pro’“ is like an Ultimate Cruising
Machine. Its native Internet design means
your messages glide onto the Info
Highway effortlessly — without any
flat tires.
Millions of Macintosh and
PC users aren't the only
ones applauding Eudora.
MecUger selected Eudora
Pro as the best communi-
cations software of 1994.
(If they'd taken price into
consideration, there
wouldn't have been any
competition.)
You don't have to be a road warrior
to get on the Internet. Eudora's
clean, intuitive interface makes hand-
ling messages a breeze. If using
your e-mail makes your hair stand
on end, call us.
To find out more information, contact your local dealer. For a listing of authorized Eudora a a a a
resellers and distributors, call: 1-800-249-2056; e-mail:. eudora-sales6@qualconnm.com; ^JU/VLCO/VvV\
fax: 619-658-1500; worldwide web address: http://www.qualcomm.com/QualHome.html.
The Internet Starter Kit Disk
The disk that comes with Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh contains all the software that you need to access
the Internet! To install any or all of these programs, just double-click on the ISKM Installer icon. See
chapter 16, "Internet Starter Kit Disk/' for a detailed list of what's installed by each option in the ISKM
Installer. For complete information for the various programs on the disk, see chapters 17, 18, 19, 21, 23,
25, 27, 29, and the ISKM Installer help text.
Anarchic 1.5 Anarchic, written by the talented and prolific Peter Lewis, is a slick FTP client program
that combines ease of use with an Archie client. Anarchic is $10 shareware, and worth every penny.
Eudora 1.5.1 Eudora is the most popular program for Internet email on the Macintosh. Created by
Steve Corner of Qualcomm, Eudora is flexible enough to work via dialup, via UUCP, or via MacTCP.
Even better, Eudora comes completely free of charge.
Internet Config 1.1 The public domain Internet Config, written by Peter Lewis and Quinn, helps
centralize all of your Internet preferences so you don't have to enter them in every program.
InterSLIP 1.0.1 InterCon Systems won a lot of friends by releasing InterSLIP as freeware for members
of the Macintosh Internet community. Along with MacTCP, InterSLIP enables you to connect to an
Internet SLIP account via modem.
MacPPP 2.0.1 MacPPP from Larry Blunk of Merit Network has long been the freeware PPP imple-
mentation of choice in the Macintosh world. Along with MacTCP, MacPPP enables you to connect to an
Internet PPP account via modem.
MacTCP 2.0.6 Here's the program that makes it all happen — MacTCP from Apple Computer. MacTCP
normally costs $59 but is licensed for use by owners of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. MacTCP is
necessary' to use programs such as Anarcliie and Netscape on the Internet.
MacWeb 1.00A3.2 EINet's free MacWeb has the lightest RAM and disk space footprint of any of the
Web browsers, and yet it manages to pack many features into that small space.
Stuffit Expander 3.5.2 Stuffit Expander is one of the most necessary programs for using the Internet
because it can debinhex files and expand the most common compression formats used on the Internet.
Stuffit Expander is free from Aladdin Systems.
Bookmarks for New Internet Programs The limited size of floppy disks frustrates me to no end,
especially when there's great software such as New'sWatcher, Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, TurboGopher,
and others that I think every Macintosh Internet user should have. There simply isn't enough room on
the disk that comes with this book to include all of them. To solve that problem. I've created Anarchie
bookmark files that point directly at the latest versions of all of the best softw'are talked about in this
book, stored on ftp . tidbits . com.
Customized MacTCP Prep Files To make it easier for you to set up your Internet account. I've
included MacTCP Prep files that you can use to easily configure MacTCP to work with any of the
Internet Starter Kit Providers listed in appendix A.
The Rest of the Best Northwest Nexus agreed to set up an FTP site for me that everyone on the
Internet could access. This way, you will have a single site to visit for all of your Macintosh Internet
applications and utilities.
The FTP site is called f tp . tidbits . com, and if you don't yet have Anarchie running (since there are
bookmarks to the site within Anarchie) you can use the standard method of accessing an anony-
mous FTP site. Just use anonymous as your username and your email address as your password. If
the machine rejects your password, try using just your username and an @ sign, as in ace@; some-
times this particular FTP ser\^er is a bit finicky.
/
/
Internet Starter Kit
for Macintosh Third Edition
Take your Mac on a world tour! Wherever you want to go,
whatever you want to do— the Internet gives you what you
need. And this book is your ticket.
Macintosh freeware and shareware progranns, universal
email, news services, games, real-time conversations with
people all across the globe, and libraries of information —
all this and more is waiting for you!
This updated edition includes a custom installer
for getting easily connected, more information on the
World Wide Web including an HTML tutorial, and special
coverage of PPP and SLIP connections and
troubleshooting.
Features access to a special FTP site containing
over 50 MB of essential Internet software.
Special offers from more than 50 regional, national,
and international Internet access providers-including free
trial time and/or discounts.
Other books just tell you about the Internet.
This one takes you there!
Here’s what people are saying
about Internet Starter Kit
for Macintosh
"Tlie Inieniet Starter Kit is, quite simply,
the best way to get you started on the
Internet. Finally, we have a true on-ramp i
the information superhighway!”
— Don Crabb, Syndicated Columnist
“Starter Kit (Second Edition) is one of the
best introductions to the Internet I’ve seen
for Macintosh users. It clearly explains
basic terms and contains excellent
resources for newsgroups, file-transfer
servers, and mailing lists, all categorized I
topic.”
— Joanna Pearlstein. Macworld
Dec., 1994
r
IVIacTCP' 2.0.6 — Your key to the Internet! The essential utility from Apple that lets you use programs like
SottW(9,re Anarchic, Eudora, and MacWeb on the Internet.
Includetl! ^^®P**** 2.0.1— The current fc\vorit^ for Internet access via a modem and a PPP account.
. * InterSLIP 1 .0.1 — Provides access to the Internet via a modem and a SLIP account.
m \ Anarchie 1 .5— The best combined Archie and FTP client for the Mac, so you can find and download
I — ^ — I ' the files you need.
\ ^udora 1 .5.1 — ^The most popular Macintosh email program; works via dialup, UUCPand MacTCP
- , Ma^Web1.00A3.2— A fast, slick World Wide Web browser.
.. \ '/ Internet Config 1 .1— Enables you to configure your Internet applications quickly and easily.
' J.^ ■’ . StuffltT)(pander™ 3.5.2— Crucial utility to decompress and debinhex files from the Net.
f \ Bookmark.,files and a custom hotlist take you to the best files and Web sites with just a click of the mouse.
■' ^ —
ISBN 1.,SBBaO-137-fl
$35.00 USA
iK(incofVAT) Hayden.
Warehouse - BK 1 4 100469
Internet Starter Kit tor Macintosh/Book and Disk
Used, Good ^
iUser Level
Books
I Accomplished Expert
jtosh Communications/Online
rio(jiifernet
REQUIREMENTS:
System 7.0 or higher
1 .4 MB disk drive
Modem (best with a fast modem]
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11